Amends
by Storm Seller
Summary: A violent relationship, an intervention, a restraining order, and some stalking. Afterwards, is there really any way to make amends? Slash.
1. Chapter 1

**Amends**

Author: Storm

Cast: House/Wilson, Cuddy, Cameron, Foreman, Chase, Stacy, Mark.

Rating: Adult

Disclaimer: Everything belongs to Greg House. Including his creators. And theirs. (The views of the characters are not necessarily the views of the author).

Summary: A violent relationship, an intervention, a restraining order, and some stalking. Afterwards, is there really any way to make amends?

**Warning: Post-domestic abuse situation: will include flashbacks.**

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**Prologue:**

It's late. So late that to those who can sleep at nights it qualifies as early. A red dawn is breaking, bloody but brilliant, over a black-and-blue sky. Puffy clouds turn purple. In a half-furnished flat, a telephone screams. The first birds shy up into wakefulness and flee.

"Hello?"

There's silence on the line: a long lingering stretch of static. It connects two hearts, beating rapidly, out of sync.

"Who is this?"

The caller ID is blank, bewildering, the number unknown. No. A pause between the flashes: no ID, no ID, no—number unlisted. Like his own. The receiver slips a little in his grasp, skating on the sweat that has broken out on his palm. _Impossible._ There's no way _he_ could have found it. Not again. He hardens his voice to hide how much it wants to shake. Maybe, if it _is_—it _can't_ be—but, if it is, if he hears him sound angry, he'll hang up…

"Who _is_ this?"

More silence. A waiting silence. A _taunting_ silence. Deliberate. Even after all this time, he can't attribute the _click, click, click_ of the line to anything other than gruelling consideration. Never mind that the last five calls like this have been an automated dialling centre belonging to the high-tech security systems he uses every time he has to move. It out-sources its marketing department to India and can't seem to translate time zones.

He gulps a mouthful of scotch from the glass on the coffee table, steeling himself. He knows he should disconnect the call, unhook the phone, wait for the police to arrive. In his mind now there is no question: it's him. Instead, he licks lips that have already dried out and speaks:

"Hello, House."

"Wilson."

His heart dips, swoops, soars – and crashes. Flames engulf him, burn him from the inside out, turn his face the colour of the dawn. He wipes his brow with a shivering hand, hot and cold and sick to his stomach.

"You found me."

"Well, you know, I _missed_ you."

Brash and sarcastic that, reverberant with the bitter laugh, trapped inside his ribcage. It dares him. Mocks him. Provokes. _Don't rise to it. Don't react. Don't, _don't, _don't_ ever_ step out of line._

"Of course I found you," House drawls. "What? Did you think I wouldn't need to know where you are, every second of every day of the rest of your life?"

The bitterness is on the surface now, sharp and cruel, ground up and spat at him from between clenched teeth.

"Nothing wrong with _my_ head, after all. Not like what's wrong with yours. And your heart."

"You can't talk to me—"

"Like that, you mean? What are you going to do about it?"

"No, I mean, you _can't_ talk to me. The restraining order."

"Oh, that." As if it were a mere trifle. "I had it rescinded."

He sits down, suddenly, on a box he hasn't yet unpacked; it whuffs at the shock of his weight. He's startled by it, more startled to realise that he'd been pacing, circling around and around like a beast in a cage.

"W-why would you do that?"

"Curiosity." The edge of laughter is back, same old smokescreen. But the words are direct. They slam into Wilson, knock all the breath out of him. He welcomes them. _Deserves_ them_._ "And, yes, I know first-hand what that does to cats – and to Houses.

"But not this time, Jimmy. Not. This. Time. You can't track my call. You don't have _my_ number. I have my answer, though. It's three a.m. and you picked up on the first ring. Not sleeping?"

"No." The phone creaks ominously in his grasp. He uncurls his fingers, one by one, stares in surprise at the bloody mess his nails have made of his palm. "Obviously."

"_Good._ I think you deserve a little insomnia, don't you?"

_Yes._

"That's it? You were calling to see if I could sleep at night?"

"No, I was calling to see if you wanted to come braid my hair and watch rom-coms."

That _goddamn_ tone of his. The phone trembles, plastic groans, near to breaking.

"Yeah, that's why I was calling, Wilson – you fucking prick. I wanted to know if you could sleep at night _after you tried to beat me to death with my own cane_."

TBC…


	2. Chapter 2

**Part One:**

"I'm sorry."

"_What?_"

House hauls the phone back toward his ear and all but gawps at it. He meant to disconnect the call, but he hasn't heard that word out of Wilson's mouth in almost five years and it's got nothing to do with the fact that he hasn't seen him in two. The one thing he always wanted to hear back then; it's the last thing he wants to hear now. Damn him when he does; damn him when he didn't. "Oh, yeah, that's going to make it aaaall better."

Assertiveness training goes out of the window. He's back to his old ways again in an instant, scorn and self-pity: a two-for-one.

"Jerking yourself off there, Jimmy?"

Hand shaking, House grabs the remote from the coffee table and shuts off the undulating, leather-bound bodies bathed in blue light that writhe on his own screen. The bondage skinflick is too phoney and fantastical when his whole body has begun to teem, remembering the ecstatic agony of _Wilson._ It renders him careless, as it always did. His next words are at once wild and calculated: a match to a touch-paper.

"You'd love me to need you to say that, wouldn't you? Love it more if it _hurts_ me, though."

The anticipated – _invoked_ – explosion doesn't come. Wilson's voice is low, firm.

"I'm going to hang up now, House."

"Don't you dare!" His rises, furious, panicking, knowing what happens next. "If you hang up, I'm not calling you back. I'm not apologising for calling you. Playing the penitent doesn't work any more—"

He breaks off and Wilson actually waits for him to finish. House rubs his leg, ansty and suspicious.

"I'm not playing," Wilson says quietly, when it's clear House is done, for now. "If that's all you called for, then you've got your answer. You can hang up. I can't call you back. There's no need for you to call me."

"That's it?"

_Impossible._ And somewhat anticlimactic. He'd expected…something. Some proof that Wilson hasn't changed. People don't, after all. It's practically his motto. That and one other. He knows better than to believe anything Wilson says next: everybody lies.

"That's it."

He doesn't quite hold back a snort.

"It's _over?_"

A pause. It's _never_ over. The three years he was with Wilson will haunt him for the rest of his life. He hadn't thought it would haunt Wilson, though. Hoped, sometimes, in his wildest, most self-destructive dreams. The static crackles between them; he imagines it as sparks. Sparks from a fire he never learned not to play with…

No. No. No. It was never as good as all that. Not even at the beginning.

_Yes, yes, yes, at the beginning._ Damn psychotherapy. He's got really bad at lying to himself.

It was nearly fucking perfect – literally _fucking_ perfect – until Wilson quit talking with his mouth and started talking with his fist.

He's not talking at all, now, though. There's no familiar crunch of knuckles punishing plasterwork. No _wham_ of a boot striking the nearest object. Not a word.

House doesn't know what to make of what he _doesn't_ say. Silence is the strangest kind of lie.

A sigh, heavy and resigned.

"I-I…it's never really over."

And _whoosh_ there it is: same old, same old.

Synergy.

House feels his heartbeat falter, resume in a new rhythm. He fingers the papers in front of him. He promised himself when he ran Wilson's file down on the system that it was for the last time. No more stalking. No more driving him out of every city he settled in with a call to the police and a carefully falsified claim of a breached restraining order. No more watching from afar. No need. He was safe; Wilson was gone.

So gone, in fact, that he'd gone and taken the alias off a part of his records that House had never even known that he'd kept. Thirty-to-forty year old notes that he'd been diverted from discovering by a half-dozen crackable aliases hiding recently embarrassing problems. These…these hadn't been embarrassing. They'd been _agonising._

Familiar too. And they'd explained some things, more than a few. Not, House reminds himself, that he considered what's in those old records an excuse. It's textbook. _Boring._

He should know better; Wilson's never boring.

He hadn't even put an alias on the latest batch of records. Probably, he didn't realise he still needed to, didn't realise that there was anyone looking when he ran away behind his anger to hide. Didn't believe anyone would ever care.

House _doesn't_ care. Does _not._ _Will_ not. It is merely a puzzle: one he was too blind a love-struck fool to see until the pieces accidentally slipped into place. He'd literally been hit in the face with them before and never seen.

With his rose-tinted glasses broken and tossed, three new things jumped out at him. Two of them, he'd seen before. Those, he knew better than to expect anything from: the name of a psychotherapist and a long-term enrolment in an anger-management programme, both dated two years ago. The third…

After that, he'd _had_ to know. He has to have proof that, even now, Wilson isn't incapable of change.

The tired, regretful voice on the other end of the line isn't convincing him.

"You can't change," he says aloud, urgent, insistent. "You haven't changed."

"No," Wilson agrees, soft, sad. "Not anymore."

_But you did,_ House's mind supplies and he curses his favourite body part for a mercenary rebel. _You did. And I didn't understand._

_What kind of goddamn useless diagnostician am I?_ Wilson had been right all along: House _had_ deserved it. A good clip around the ear on a nightly basis and _he hadn't noticed._

"I'm sorry," he says, sudden, rough, shocking himself. He can't remember the last time _he_ said those words. Not since Wilson left. His therapist would be so proud. Apart from the part where he's saying them to Wilson again, over and over, falling back into that habitual mantra of self-blame and shame. "I'm sorry. Wilson, I am _so_ sorry."

"Don't you dare!" Sharp, that, and quick, but with none of the anger he expects and all of the pained, self-abasing, guilt-complex crap he remembers from years and years before. "Don't apologise to me, House, _please_. It was all my fault."

"Hmm…"

Apparently Wilson _does_ know what to make of what House doesn't say, because the intake of breath is short and horrified.

"You bastard," he whispers, like something fragile inside him has just fallen apart, something he's been protecting for a long time, whatever the cost. "You've got my medical file."

House taps it, lightly, against his scarred thigh and ponders the problems of leverage.

Wilson sighs, so heavy it's nearer to a groan, and House can hear the rumple of hair and skin as he scrubs his hand over his face.

"Well," he says soberly. "Now you know."

TBC…


	3. Chapter 3

**Part Two:**

They meet in the Starbucks at the Richard Stockton service area on the Turnpike. Some quirk of the probability laws puts their cars nose to nose in the parking lot, bumpers almost touching. Two engines tick and heat huffs from cooling radiators to cloud the glacial December air. The illusion is of large mechanical animals, sniffing warily at one another.

Wilson hovers by the side of his hired saloon, unwilling to make the first move. He shoves his hands deep into the pockets of his brown trenchcoat and hunches his shoulders against the chill. To the casual observer, he looks anxious: the younger, more innocent party in this uneasy ceasefire.

House stares straight at him, chin up, all challenge and unbreakable pride. He stalks forward immediately, setting course for the café as if there is no reason to pause, no other motive here than caffeine in this unholy betwixt and between two cities and pasts.

Wilson follows, a summoned demon. His blood curdles as he notices, habitually, the tantalising hints of fragility: the tense grip House has on his cane, the way he keeps the car between them until there is no more of it, the careful sidestep he takes to avoid Wilson moving around to where he might grab that hard wooden shaft. Under UV light, Wilson wonders, would there still be blood on it?

They don't speak. They find a window booth, central, visible from the lot, the rest of the seating area and the till. A pink-haired waitress young enough to be House's granddaughter takes their order. Wilson pays upfront, not knowing yet if he'll need to make a quick exit. The clink of cutlery surrounds them, like a chain-link fence shifting in the gathering gusts of an incoming storm. Feeling cornered, Wilson's knuckles turn the colour of the cream he stirs into his coffee.

House's shrewd eyes take in every second of his coiled discomfort.

"So," he drawls, over the chitter of stainless steel utensils circling inside cheap ceramic mugs. "Nice day for it."

It's not as bland as he intended. It's edgy, mocking. The overhead clouds huff and spit a fresh bout of rain against the window. Wilson finds himself bracing, resentful, impelled to confront this head-on, not play at making a peace-treaty. Kipling's serving men line themselves up on his tongue, their questions poised. He reminds himself that he's overreacting. That attack is _not_ the best form of defence. He swallows hard and searches for something less loaded to reply.

He tries: "You look well."

Lies, really. It's not how he wanted this to go, but its safer. He hopes. The deception isn't much of one when it's as clear as their reflections in the cloud-shadowed glass. Clean-shaven and silver-haired, the planes of House's angular face are sharp and clear. His blue eyes gleam, reflecting the ceiling lights, bright and brilliant. He doesn't look _well_; he looks _haunting._

He scoffs, brassy and dismissive. Wilson realises he was meant to take the initiative just before House says:

"We're not here to play Follow the Leader down some dodgy dialogue back alleys." He takes a pill with his first mouthful of coffee and, after a heartbeat's consideration, a handful of Wilson's fries. "You wanted to talk. So, talk."

He bites the ends off the fries jutting between his fingers, taking his sweet time about it, before he crams the rest into his mouth. Wilson clenches his fists under the table and struggles to breathe around the lump in his throat. He wants to snap at House, demand he not do that. Not with that watchful, calculating look in his eyes. Not when he used to be so careless about it, so playful. It is not an auspicious start.

He sips his coffee, trying to collect himself, and burns his tongue. It stutters, flinching, when he tries to shape words with it.

"No. I—this – meeting – it was your idea."

"Right." House masticates languidly. "Gotta bring out the big guns. Talk with a capital 't'. You know, really work out our issues."

Wilson sucks his tongue and huffs in his nose, not quite a laugh, not quite a sneer. That is definitely not why they're here. He answers under his breath, muttering, satiric.

"'Cause that went so well last time we tried it."

House's eyes go wide, as though he has taken Wilson seriously.

"Whoa! What's this 'we'? It was _you_—" He breaks off, his expression of shock distilling into one of twisted lips and canted brows. "Wilson. Relax."

_Damnit, House._

"You're kidding."

_You jerk._

The corner of House's mouth bucks up higher still; his reflexive, defensive humour had ramped up into a full-scale feint. He diffuses it dismissively, turning cynical, sardonic.

"I haven't been brainwashed. I know how often I threw the first—"

It's instinctive to interject.

"Plate? Bottle? Book?"

"_Punch._"

That's as blunt and hard as if he'd done it again. Wilson automatically shakes his head to clear it.

House misunderstands, continues firmly.

"No, I do. I have this whole chart worked out: flow, block and scatter graphs, percentages, who started what and how, who finished it, how, what used to happen and re-happen. I have it up on the wall in our—my—bedroom."

He steals another fry and contemplates the salt grains lining it.

"Only thing of yours I still have."

The pause is cluttered. Like House's apartment, it's filled with dusty books, ageing furniture, instruments he's had since high school; the relics that he clings to, that made him _feel_, joy, grief, power, passion. Anything except loss. For a terrible moment Wilson wonders if he's built some sort of shrine out of old pizza boxes and porno cassettes. Then House looks upward from under his lined, heavy brow, adds:

"And the scars."

That is, all broken skin and bones considered, remarkably unjudgemental. Wilson tells himself that this is better than a mouldering take-out tower; House has only held onto the memories of the bad times. Even so, he feels sick when House stabs a fry into the little pot of ketchup and licks the red, congealing fluid off the end; the way he used to lick his bloody lips.

"I'm not the only one with those, though, am I?" House eats the offending fry and studies him, serious. "Wanna compare?"

Wilson's left hand drifts to his surgical scar, the raised twist palpable through his sweater vest.

"You think that excuses me, do you?"

House's face thins, tightens. "It's better than the ones you used to use."

Wilson looks down, into the murky depths of his coffee, guilty. It's galling to remember the relief he felt when he'd got the diagnosis, that and the sharp, coppery smell of his therapist's blood congealing on his knuckles as he sobbed into his hands, glad, _so_ glad that there was an explanation for this, that it wasn't all _him_, all his fault.

He clears his throat, harshly enough to reprimand himself for temporarily sidestepping culpability.

"I didn't have excuses, House. I had accusations."

The pause is awkward. House glances up to study him a few seconds after Wilson gives up waiting for him to meet his eye. Obviously, that was deliberate. House is pondering that, puzzling it out. Hardly surprising. I-statements weren't part of Wilson's repertoire before. It was always "you." You _make me so angry._ _If_ you _didn't keep doing that_… You _should know better._ You _know how I get._ _This is_ your _fault._ _Damnit, House,_ you're _doing this on purpose!_ Wilson shudders at the remembered voice in his head. It's not so loud now, nor forceful, but it's insidious. And that's how it starts. He can't put all of this down to his illness, after all.

His phone interrupts, mercifully. Momentarily. It jerks and kicks its way across the table. Wilson glances at the number and quickly shuts it off. House watches the screen until it goes dark.

Slowly, he shakes his head and says: "No. You had _reasons._"

Wilson swallows, rapid and convulsive. Nausea clutches at his throat. His skin scuttles. Where anger used rear, panic swells instead. He grips his cup for something to hold onto. House considers him, nods, almost to himself, and a certain braced set about him relaxes, by degrees. When he takes the initiative, Wilson feels himself calming, as if it's natural, instinctive. He tenses again immediately, fingers bunching around the handle of his cup. It's _not_ natural. It's goddamn Pavlovian.

"Where did you go, after the trial?"

He forces himself to pick up his mug, swig, swallow, lower, and loosen his grip. That _is_ reassuring; not the action itself, but that he does not instantly, fierily, _re_act.

"I thought you knew. You kept close tabs on me."

House shrugs, not denying it.

"Once you took that first job in New York, yeah. You were gone six months before that."

The panic departs, for now, leaving behind a deep ache in payment. Those months were hard, at the time, so hard. The hardest, worst, and best he's ever been through. Wilson misses them now. Sometimes, while he was there, he felt...secure. Serene. _Safe._

Of course, he'd had no idea House was looking for him.

He swirls his coffee around, staring at it, but seeing beyond, behind. Visions of the past circle in his mind's eye, like a whirlpool on rewind.

"After you refused to testify against me, the DA offered me a pre-trial deferment programme, which if I successfully completed might result in a _nolle prosse_. I was given a choice of facilities, picked one and admitted myself for treatment for a dual diagnosis of alcoholism and a chronic mood disorder."

"Where?"

Wilson tongues his lower lip, hesitating, and finally says: "Horizons. It's the other side of New York."

"It's a grade one psychiatric facility!" House interjects, spiky with concern.

It's Wilson's turn to shrug. He swallows the bitter dregs of his coffee.

"Yeah."


	4. Chapter 4

**Part Three:**

Wilson's phone interrupts again while House is trying to corral his startled thoughts. They freeze, momentarily, as the peals spin out. Wilson's not the type to characterise callers by customised ringtones, but something about the tone and its rapid repetition strikes House as imperious, demanding. He makes a one-handed gesture to indicate that Wilson should answer and tries to suppress the muscle-bunching urge to recoil when he does not.

Wilson's a compulsive phone-answerer. The only time he ever let it ring and ring was when he was in one of his rages. If he could hear the bell over the blood rushing in his ears, the roaring of his voice and the punishing _crunch_ of his fist on House's bones, it served only to further incense him. House's throat starts to close with the suffocating rise of fear. He jumps when Wilson brings his hand down sharply and switches the phone to silent. A twitch of his wrist sends it scudding aside.

The quiet is sudden. It surrounds them, squirrels them away inside a private bubble, years from the chattering din and primary colours of the busy café. Sweat breaks out on House's back and his skin prickles. He's breathing too quickly and the air tastes humid, metallic. Wilson's knuckles gouge at the tabletop. The muscles in his forearm bulge; the tendons stand out like steel cords. He rolls his shoulders and settles, but House's flesh still aches with memory.

He wants to take a pill then; the craving stirs, chimeric and inevitable. It's still able to flay him raw and desperate in an instant, but his will is an iron cage and he's got the keys to it now instead of the bed of nails inside. These pills wouldn't do much in any case. The urge is just a reflex. A flinch. It's not a good sign, but he did not expect to come through this meeting unscathed.

"You didn't have an addiction to alcohol." He speaks with the surety of one altogether too intimate with dependence. "You weren't crazy either."

Wilson thumbs a milky drip off coffee off the white rim of his mug, the touch so gentle and sweeping that House's skin roils again, remembering. _Remembering._ Ah! _God…_ The first intense, tentative strokes of Wilson's fingers exploring him, heavy and tumescent through the thin fabric of his boxers; the slow, circling pressure of strong hands mapping every inch of House's worn topography, warming him, _wanting_ him. It had never changed. From the first day to the last day there had always been moments when Wilson would smooth him, grasp at him, hold him with quiet, enraptured desperation.

The back of House's hand tingles, feeling again that final, fragile, fluttering brush of Wilson's fingertips as he knelt on the floor, the knees of his favourite cream suit soaking up House's blood, the cold breeze blowing in from the street and the sound of the car engine running. He'd stormed out – and immediately come back. Then he'd crouched there amidst broken wood and glass and overturned furniture, dialling nine-one-one, his eyes blank with shock, but that same silent appeal in his terrible, quavering touch. _Don't leave me. Please don't leave me._

_A piece of work, your boyfriend. A real piece of work._ House replays the words of the cop who'd sat at his bedside to wait for a statement. He'd meant _nasty_, but the words had been true without the adjective. A piece of work. Someone's project. Cunningly, committedly, crafted that way. He feels that as one who knows it first-hand too.

"No, I wasn't addicted," Wilson agrees, at length.

House nods to himself. The alcoholism must've been assumed from the cops' reports, accumulated over the years. _He'd_ been the one dabbling his toes at the edge of a drinking problem, but the broken bottles and the distillery stench of liquor splattered up the walls must've set up a two plus two equals twenty-two equation in the minds of the old-hands at dealing with domestic disputes. Wilson was rarely drunk during their fights; he'd nearly bloody drowned himself _after._ If they could've stopped fighting, Wilson would've stopped drinking, not the other way around.

"The mood disorder, well…" Wilson rubs his thumb and forefinger together, smudging the coffee traces into the swirls of his prints.

House has a sudden reckless urge to lean over and lick it off, to make Wilson smile and alleviate that fretful fidgeting that is a trademark of all psych ward patients. He thinks, as Wilson says:

"I always thought 'shellshock' was a better word for it than post-traumatic stress disorder."

"Captures the essence of the thing," House seconds.

He thinks of the soldiers' reflexive startling that accompanied such minor things as the careless, explosive slam of a door. Around the military bases he'd grown up on it was always _shellshock._ Living on the training grounds for a war-zone in some ways he'd still been further from the action than Wilson in his cookie-cutter suburban neighbourhood.

Small wonder the shrinks hadn't thought of it first, though. House has seen the theories that had been trialled and tested. Undiagnosed schizophrenia had topped the list. There's a family history, after all, and Wilson's Mr. Nice Guy persona could have been simply one of the behaviours he'd learned to imitate, emotionless. House can't help wondering if Wilson were schizophrenic he might not seem saner. Violent emotion for him has always been, well, _violent._

House drums his fingers on the table, mentally reviewing the file.

"The PTSD diagnosis makes sense. Once you started talking about—"

The phone leaps on the table, spooking them both. They gaze at it in saucer-eyed silence as it scuttles towards them with the force of its own vibrations. Wilson hesitates, as if he's afraid to touch it, then hastily shuts it off again. He shudders slightly, rippling muscles. Sympathy, and self-preservation, make House curtail the sentence.

"It must've been obvious. How did they get to—?"

"Rushing me into surgery?" Wilson smiles: a sad, washed out, painful, little thing. "Much the same way you did."

House raises an eyebrow and Wilson's smile turns knowing.

"Come on. It's why you didn't testify against me. Once you were in hospital, your arms in splints, your legs in traction and not a damn thing to do except think, you weren't thinking about yourself. You never do. You thought about me. Your symptoms were my symptoms."

House frowns, because he wants to smile himself. He notices things about people, little things that no one else ever seems to notice about each other. Until Wilson, certainly no one ever noticed the little things about him.

He returns the favour once more, thinking of the file, the steady sequence of annotations, progress reports, medication regimes and setbacks. Then the sudden scarlet deluge of emergency procedures. A to C without passing B. Assessment to Chaos. _Oh shit, we missed it_ in medical speak.

"You beat up your shrink," he states.

Wilson grimaces, as if his answer is going to taste vile.

"I nearly killed him, too."

He sighs and picks up his cup, seemingly forgetting that he's finished the coffee. He sets it down again and his eyes roam uneasily around, searching for something other than House's face. He fixes on the window. The rain has set in. It gushes down the glass in long, shivering streams.

"Things were so going well," Wilson says softly. "It was hard. God, it was _hard,_ Greg. There's a whole bio-psycho-social-spiritual system of approach there. The days are packed. It's very regimented. There are psycho-educational presentations, psychopharmacological interventions, integrative therapies, CBT and, of course, for me, anger-management, which fulfilled the court's requirements."

He stirs, that restless, nervy unease again, and reaches up to grasp the back of his neck, rubbing at an ache, either real or echoic. The last two he must have struggled with, badly.

His tone lightens, as if he's learned to distract himself.

"There're even experimental therapies." He chuckles faintly. "Which is how I ended up squashing my balls against the saddle pommel on horseback, climbing walls, and spouting soliloquies with a pair of wooden horns on my head.

"God, but it _was_ going well. And then it wasn't. Which is the understatement of the century, but…there you have it." He digs at his neck harder, drops his arm with a sigh and gets to the point. "At first they were trying to help me with minimal pharmacological intervention, just a mild tranquiliser, only it wasn't enough. Without the alcohol I started to get severe panic attacks, palpitations, bouts of diaphoresis…" he pauses, adds with appropriate perplexity, "paroxysmal hypertension combined with bouts of orthostatic hypotension."

A small shrug and he goes to pick up his empty mug once more, then closes his fist on the air beside it. Noticing the way House's eyes are involuntarily drawn to it, Wilson clasps his hands unthreateningly behind the saucer. House tries not to imagine the shattering of crockery.

It doesn't come. _Obviously._ Wilson clears his throat and continues again, rueful covering for regret:

"Within a few months I was on a cocktail drugs: detox, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety, and beta-blockers. I'm not pretending I was Mr. Laid-Back to being with, but I'd been starting to get a better grip on my temper. _I_ _thought._ Except, not long after they added the last one, I lost it in the middle of a one-on-one. I trashed the office – ten grand's worth of damage to the fixtures – and…you can guess the rest."

An icy, lock-jawed rigidity claims House and internal barricades slam up. A few years therapy aren't enough to put a crack through the walls he learned to construct just out of the cradle. A chip or two, maybe, but they're still sound. Behind them, he's safe. Numb. He won't feel it. Can't remember. But he's heard enough graphic accounts of what Wilson did to him that final night to imagine. Cameron and Chase and the cops and Cuddy all told him a version when they were yowling at him to _testify_, damnit, House! _He deserves to go to jail!_ Their stories spin in front of his eyes; mercifully, the face of the victim belongs to someone else.

He speaks over it, brusque and detached, blocking out the worst of the quasi-flashback.

"So you beat the seven bells out of the guy and collapsed three minutes later with a suspected heart attack," he declares, with fumbling, compulsive fingers organising the nearest napkin into an origami elephant, an unconscious metaphor for the unnamed presence that occupies their table. "Blood pressure through the roof."

Wilson nods. Strangely, he seems more subdued now than before, as if his anger is something that he is resigned to having as a part of him, deep in his psyche and DNA. He cannot have adjusted to having a huge part of it cut out and physically taken away.

"The guy was spitting teeth and he rode in the ambulance with me, made them take me to a specialist unit in one of the nearby hospitals. Said one word and they all listened to him."

He sighs suddenly, tracing it in a little spilt coffee on the pinky-red speckled Formica table. It does not look like a spatter pattern, House tells himself, measured by Forensics with little bits of string until it becomes artistic, abstract geometry, imprinted into paint as surely as wounds into flesh. It doesn't. It does _not._

But…_one word and they listened to him. Three_ months _of a man sniffling into a handkerchief and doing "My name is Wilson and I'm a [insert social crime here]" round robins, _one_ good smack down, and he could_ see. Wilson had practically written it in every scientific language House spoke, not to mention on his walls and on his body… _Fifteen _years_ and I didn't see…_ _Christ. I earned _everything _he ever did to me_. _And then some. _

Unconsciously, House thumps the elephant flat with his fist.

Wilson stares at him for a few seconds, long enough for House to realise what he's done. In turn he withdraws his fist, acquiring a cold fry on the way and _chomps._ Wilson wets his lips and goes on, clinical now, but so soft he sounds almost as though he's apologising for House's love-and-black-eye blinkered idiocy.

"He'd seen it before, apparently, a couple of times. The doctors tried to get my blood pressure down and, of course, couldn't initially – giving them partial confirmation. They walloped me full of phenoxybenzamine, got me stabilised and did a CT to confirm. I was put on labetalol too and salt loaded prior to surgery. An open laparotomy was performed and adrenalectomy. Damn thing was huge – twelve centimetres. Non-cancerous, although the word _benign_ hardly seems appropriate. Probably hereditary."

"Nice catch," House remarks sarcastically. "You being an oncologist and all."

Wilson hangs his head, losing colour rather than flushing. "Honestly, by this point I though I had it all figured out. And it was incredibly simple: the world had it in for me and I was a bastard."

"Again in the non-literal sense."

Wilson's mouth twists ruefully. "Apparently so."

House studies the eloquent caffeine and, disgusted with himself, sweeps it away with a swish of his hand. _Damnit!_ He'd seen it before too. And Wilson. They're both fools for not seeing it _in_ Wilson.

He says it out loud, too late to be any use of course.

"Pheochromocytoma."

TBC…


	5. Chapter 5

Apologies for the delay - and thanks to those of you who've contacted me to nag/encourage! Due to length, this chapter is broken into two parts, both of which will come from Wilson's point of view. House will take over again in part 6.

* * *

**Part Five A:**

_Pheochromocytoma._

The word hangs between them like a corpse from a beam. Wilson can almost hear it creak under its own weight as House revolves it, examines it from all sides. He's sure that any moment for his former friend will abruptly nod, declare it the relationship's cause of death and, leaping to his feet, sentence them both to immediate, permanent separation.

His stomach twists in anticipation of it; the same potent cocktail of trepidation and hope that comes each time the phone rings and silence answers his hello. The resultant rush of adrenaline strings him out. He starts when the café bell jangles, certain that House will be disappearing out of the door, puzzle completed, case closed.

Instead, a woman in a yellow raincoat shepherds in three drenched kids. House simply raises his hand and, with an embarrassingly imperious finger-snap, summons the waitress. Surprised, Wilson wonders why he is. The pheo isn't half the answer. The death knell, maybe, but House is a self-made sleuth and professional pain in the ass. There's no chance of avoiding an autopsy.

The waitress brings them the necessary tools to effect it: a jug of ice water, two fresh coffees and extra cream. She tucks her pink bangs behind her heavily hoop-adorned ears and asks whether they want to pay now or later. Wilson, grimly, suspects both.

House says "Now," and looks expectantly at him.

_Of course._ Wilson's automatically reaching for his wallet when it occurs to him that House is watching him more intently than the situation warrants, as if it's no longer habit to shamelessly scrounge off him, rather something he is trying on for size again, like an old sweater or – knowing House – his college tux, which might harbour a secret intention to throttle him with its bow tie.

It seems, on the surface, like a tentative invitation to friendship; but Wilson recognises the power play for what it is. House's innate contumaciousness makes it inevitable that he will keep testing the precarious parameters of this truce of theirs. A familiar sense of inadequacy invades, drags Wilson's shoulders down and gnaws at his gut, at once heavy and hollow. He can't even begin to guess what paying might mean. As always, he feels unmanned, the junior partner.

His conditioned compulsion is never to accept second-best status, yet it was in part the challenge of striving to keep up with House's deranged untouchable intellect that first attracted him. That great mind and, behind the daunting integument of it, that great heart too. He reminds himself that the kind of man who punches his way through problems is a fool to delude himself he has got the best of anything. The idea troubles him; whatever his shrink states, the world – _his_ world – is not so black and white as that. It does not occur to him that he is not irked by the continual testing, merely anxious and cautiously curious.

Taking a chance on breaking a pattern, Wilson withdraws his hand. He crosses his arms and suggests:

"Your turn."

House tries to frown, but an upward twitch of his lip dislodges it. While the girl looks on with the undisguised delight of an open-minded teen realising she has just found two people to be open-minded about, he extracts a fistful of change and with unnecessarily protracted calculations pays the tab and tip. He waits until the girl leaves before he dismisses the double meaning with a shake of his head.

"Differential's not done, buddy."

Wilson figured. His eyes veer from House's to contemplate his own reflection in a teaspoon. He suspects he knows what is coming, yet dreads what else House might have discovered about him, diagnosing long-distance from only biased memories and the bare bones of a pilfered file. From within the thick of it, there's still so much Wilson doesn't understand about himself.

The teaspoon captures his self-conscious naivety. Its metal concavity tricks away the markers of middle age, smoothes his brow and accentuates his cheekbones, rendering his forty-something face disingenuously boyish. Only his dark eyes betray him: shadowed, tired, and cynical.

He says flatly: "It's a little late to be looking for a different diagnosis."

"Not looking for an instead of—" House begins, but Wilson interrupts, determinedly evasive.

"Ocham's Razor!"

House baulks at the tone, then rolls his eyes at them both. "I'd repeat my sex versus stork theory, but no one ever listens. You said it yourself. The _simplest_ explanation was that you were a bastard."

It's out before Wilson can stop himself.

"Isn't the simplest explanation that yo—_somebody_ screwed up?"

He bites his tongue and shifts his involuntary glower to the sauce-stained silk daisy in the table vase. He's acutely aware of the frustration in his voice. He does not, he _can_not, he's _learned_ not, to blame House for this, for not diagnosing him sooner. They were taught to recognise a cry for help bleeding out of razorblade gashes scored into forearms and thighs or in the puffy, tender, Braille left by bruises. They were taught _not_ to wind up eye-to-fist with a rampaging lunatic, never mind being fool enough to whip out a microscope and start hmming and hawing over probable cause. Why _should_ House have figured out that he had a tumour, let alone an inoperable past that cannot be so neatly excised? Wilson was the one doing the damage and it had taken him long enough to realise that he wasn't so much beating House as _begging_ him for help.

It took him so long, in fact, that even if House _had_ figured any part of it out back then Wilson doubts that he himself would have been willing to admit it. Then again, knowing House, he wouldn't've had to. One problem at least would have been solved: he'd've wound up in an exploratory surgery with his signature faked on the forms. No matter how much he's scared House, scared him quite literally stupid sometimes, he's never managed to scare him _off._

There's proof enough of that as House glares at him, all arrogance and affront.

"The simplest explanation is _never _that _I_ screwed up," he retorts.

Annoyance sweeps its horns in Wilson; but the beast is kept penned by a relieved sort of pride. No matter what else he might have decimated, House's professional ego is not part of the collateral.

House lets his words sink in for a moment, before he quietly corrects himself:

"But I did."

The pause is stifling. Wilson wrestles with the rationality of them both holding House partially responsible. It's not guilt and blame, but logic, experience: House _should _have known. It's not just his job; it's his pathology. In evident concurrence, House reaches for his pill bottle to dull the edge of mutual reproach.

The _click-clack_ of tumbling tablets makes Wilson tense. House's chronic narcotic abuse triggered more of their fights than all the other causes combined. House knows it too and his blue eyes are watchful, anticipating Wilson's next reaction. He realises that it's not just a deflection, it's another test: _How much did I screw up? How much of your violence was_ _nothing that I could cure?_

Wilson's hands ride the edge of the table and he suspects that this test he's about to fail, let House off the hook. The voice has returned, searingly spiteful. _Still trying to kill yourself, Greg? Not so much schadenfreude in it for you if you can't do it in front of me, huh? _He catches himself, turns the brewing antipathy inward to squelch the mental antagonist. _And wouldn't you have earned that one? You know he's a provoking bastard. But _you_ are the one who crossed the line. Now stop. Stop. Stop._

House quirks a look at him, intrigued by his restraint. He crunches noisily, then turns the bottle so that Wilson can read the label. His brows descend, sceptical, but it helps him subside. All the same, he's beginning to question why it is that House has come. To prove that Wilson hasn't changed? That he can't? Or that he, House, _can_ and _has_? The latter seems improbable, but House isn't likely to voluntarily dissect himself in some fair is fair sharing and caring ritual. Wilson asks nonetheless, shying from the pressure of the spotlight:

"Why are you here?"

House harrumphs, impatient.

"That's easy. The _real_ question is: why did _you_ come?"

A mirthless puff of air slips from Wilson's lips, masquerading as a chuckle. Now that the voice has shut up again, that's easy too.

"I came to apologise. For what good it will do, I more than owe it to you."

House's eyes swerve from his. He shifts in the booth, jeans squeaking a protest against the red plastic bench. Anger aside, he's never been comfortable with intense emotions.

"I am sorry," Wilson insists, regardless; then, as House squirms again, he apologises for apologising: "You don't have to accept, of course. But I have to say it; it's part of my programme. You know, green tea, meditation…grovelling."

That garners an almost-smile from across the table, all crooked and crumpled and raw. It _does_ mean something to him then. For that, Wilson's glad.

House clears his throat roughly and breezes right past the awkward intimacy for a headlong invasion of privacy: "Nice try. What's behind door number two?"

With uncanny timing, the phone summons Wilson again.

That makes four calls now. The same number flashes with the ominous persistence of a counted parental warning. The kind that precedes a resounding _smack_ and a scarlet handprint on a child's bare bottom. _One… Two…_ No such thing as _two and half_. Simply, _**wallop**_. He steels himself to pick up and the phone is snatched from beneath his outstretched hand.

House seizes possession of the device. Reprehension contorts his expressive features, makes Wilson duck and yield. House wrenches the back off the phone, baring battery, sim card and delicate mechanisms. He brutally plunges the pieces into the water jug. They drown amidst punishing collision of ice-cubes.

"What the _hell_—?"

Wilson recovers fast. He's on his feet before the phone has sunk. House blenches and his spine cracks against the back of the seat, head jerking with the whiplash recoil of his neck and shoulders. His eyes are on Wilson, fixed wide and wary. He's primed to duck, to defend himself.

Wilson stares back slack-jawed and stupefied by the dizzying void where heat and sudden hatred should be. It has become second nature to dish out retribution for any fault, like a well-versed puppet in a generational Punch and Judy show. But this time _that_ voice, the vicious one, is silent. In his mind's eye, it has its finger to its lips, eyes scrunched closed. Once upon a time, he remembers, it too knew fear.

It is timorously that his eyes finally twitch toward the phone again. It bobs near the surface, suspending retribution. _For now._ His heart starts to pound and the shuffling knock of plastic against ice sounds like footsteps approaching, the trembling of knees. He's hardly aware of how close he comes to slinking under the table or that his lips move in silent prayer. The _snap_ of the back and the last trilling whine of the phone replay in his head, become the crack of leather and the vicious carillon of a belt buckle. He makes a belated grab for the phone and overturns his coffee.

House's hand shoots out, catching his tumbling cup before it can shatter on the cheap mottled linoleum. Dark liquid floods the table, laps up against the lip and drips down over the side.

"Shoot!"

Wilson drops back into his seat, scoots his knees away from the trickle and mops hurriedly at the mess with a handful of napkins. They turn spongy and tawny, mould themselves to the inside of his fist, flimsy as his composure.

"What did you do that for?" he hisses, lowering at House across the murky swamp. "That could've been the hospital."

House presses a squelching wad of napkins into the flood and scoffs.

"No, it couldn't." He lets the wet napkins splat on top of the damaged daisy and grabs another two handfuls from the table dispenser. "You'd've answered the first time if it was Chicago Grace. You were never going to answer that."

"I was being polite," Wilson snaps.

Sweat is beading under his moppy fringe. Their shaking hands skirt each other's edgily as the last of the coffee collects between them, four crumpled fistfuls of napkin shaping a paper dam.

"No," House challenges, across the quivering pond, "You weren't."

Wilson's eyes drop first and he finds himself longing for the absent anger.

"You can't just say out of anything, can you?" he growls, trying to affect it, and knows he falls short when House shoves the napkins together, bumps their knuckles, and keeps pushing.

"If I did that, I'd never have found out about this."

"That," Wilson says through his teeth, "would have been better for both of us."

"Only if you particularly like moving house."

He doesn't. He's damn tired of it, but for the fact that up until now it's the only contact with House that he's been able to retain, safely removed. There's been a strange comfort in knowing that House can't, or won't, stay out of his life.

"You know who that was," Wilson mutters, relenting. He snags all the napkins, wipes away the worst of the spillage, and stuffs them in the empty cup, as if that will stop the urge to shiver like the last drops of coffee on the table. "You know why I picked _today_ to meet you."

House makes a derisive sound from the relative safety of the table's other side.

"Well, _duh._ That tumour that the New York surgeons tossed in a trashcan didn't _cause_ that nasty temper of yours; it was the catalyst for losing it. Repressed rage, Jimmy, it's always worse than the huff and puff of the perpetual hotheads."

Wilson halts that assertion with a canted brow, but House shoots the same look back. It's fair enough, Wilson supposes. For all his fume and fire, House never came close to putting _him_ in hospital.

"Point is," House goes on, "It took you ten years to go from bottling your own reflection over a jerk with a jukebox to bludgeoning me on a doormat. All those nasty shots of adrenaline getting fired off, stronger and stronger as the tumour grew, that's why you'd lose it, that's why you couldn't stop. Fight or flight instinct; it's pure endocrinology. You were a walking Darwinism."

Wilson pulls a face, interrupts: "Yeah, the kind that ought to win an internet award – and take himself out of the gene pool."

House's look is long and penetrating.

"Well, you never did want kids," he says, without any levity at all. "Afraid they'd come with a free subscription to the school of abusive assholes, huh? After all, you already had the uniform yourself, no matter how much you tried to hide it."

"PCC's linked to MEN II RET-oncogene mutations _are_ hereditary," Wilson murmurs, cagey.

For a split-second, he thinks House will touch his hand across the table. His fingers hover in mid-air, before he quickly picks up his coffee and slurps exaggeratedly.

"Not what I meant," he says.

Wilson closes his eyes briefly. _I know. I know._

House studies him over the rim for a few seconds, then backs off, giving him a moment to steady himself. He gestures with his mug.

"Nice decoy, though," he offers lightly. "French shoes and a pocket protector really don't scream sadist, do they?

That is gentler, like fingers tickling under his ribs. Wilson's chest contracts, tight and painful; it takes him a moment to understand it's because he's suppressing the urge to laugh at a familiarly inappropriate moment. It makes it easier not to be angry at the relentless interrogation or even want to be. House's curiosity is not as callous as he likes to make out. Wilson's next breath quavers on the exhale.

_Oh, Greg, Greg,_ _I've missed you._

_I _miss _you. _

"Shoes speak?" he tries, diverting, voice light so it doesn't sound too strangled.

"Shoes," House informs him seriously, "Never lie. Yours are positively garrulous. They never shut up. Loquacious loafers, in fact."

Wilson tries to smile, but it's strained. All of a sudden, he doesn't want to know what his shoes say. House tells him anyway, punctuating himself with noisy gulps from his unfinished coffee. He pokes at Wilson's toes with his cane tip, under the table.

"Smart, stylish, but above all _professional_. Can't bear anyone to see you as anything else. Expensive but not extortionate, advertises that you have ample means and you're neither stingy nor extravagant. Newish style, in last season, but fit for a few more. You're aware of fashion, but not obsessed with it. A modern man, no flouncing metrosexual. With the twelve hundred dollar suit, you're a walking Personals column for every woman and gay man out there. 'Come date the doctor.'"

He snickers at his own bizarre humour.

"The ties, though…" He uses the mug to indicate the diagonally striped one that Wilson doesn't think matches his navy sweater vest or lemon shirt. "The ties say colour-blind. A project, something malleable, nearly but not quite perfect. You _are_ colour-blind, but you shop at department stores where there are buyers producing outfits ready to wear. And you keep your suits in a walk-in closet with a rotating tie rack, everything in the same order so that you _know _it all matches. The uncoordinated ties are a rebellion – or maybe a warning – you _want_ people to know up front that you shouldn't be put on a pedestal. That _you_ don't think you're worthy of it."

Wilson reaches for the knot on said tattletale tie; it has tightened itself somehow, to the point of choking him.

"Stop," he says, half-plea, half warning.

House waves the mug again and pays no heed.

"The pocket protector is the give-away. It matches the professionalism of the shoes, but nothing else. It's nerdy, fastidious, a hallmark for OCD and an appearance fixation. You present yourself as something that everybody wants, _because_ you don't believe you're it. You think the only thing that makes you worth anything is your work. The pocket protector brings out the loafers' inner geek. Says you're a compulsive over-achiever, desperate to prove yourself. Typical middle child syndrome."

"House. _Stop."_

Wilson means it this time. Doesn't care what it takes to achieve it. The rage is back. _And about damn time._

House ignores it, nervous, but stubborn.

"Then there's those phone calls. Shoes gossip, Jimmy, but that cell phone of yours _does _scream."

Anger becomes anguish, fast enough to leave Wilson faint. He's spent so long incarcerated in his temper that the sheer capacity of his own body to produce other emotion is overwhelming. The cage was of his own making, but he hardly knows how to live without it. He feels bare, vulnerable, terrified.

House doesn't just know. He knows _everything._ Not just a ten-dollar's worth of sitting duck diagnosis, but a past that he hid and House didn't, a past that is always present, that makes each of them their own worst enemy.

House contemplates the silent, sunken phone, and says:

"How old is daddy dearest today, by the way, seventy?"

Sick with shame that he's become the very man he shrinks from, Wilson pinches the bridge of his nose. Through his fingers, he says: "Yeah."

Something sways in front of his vision and he glances up to find House holding a fry out to him: a processed potato branch from a grouchy vulture. Wilson can't help but take it.

"You _are_ getting better," House assures him, as he nibbles it, tries painfully to swallow. "Not from alcoholism or even the PTSD, but getting better at avoiding the cause of it, at least. If you weren't, you'd be at the family shindig."

Wilson wishes he believed it. There aren't enough drugs in a pharmacy to get his nerves out of the Gordian snarl-up they're in, at least not without curing him of life too.

"I can get away with not being there," he says, still trying to convince himself that it's a fact. "I'm a doctor."

"Should've learned to roll your sleeves up sooner," House chides, not exactly gentle. "That card's been hidden in your cuff all along."

Their eyes catch for a second. House's are jaded with understanding.

TBC…


	6. Chapter 6

**Part Five B:**

Wilson should expect the next remark, but he doesn't. Silently, it's already been said.

"Your father used to hit you."

He's answered it too. There's no use denying it now. Still, conditioning makes him hedge:

"How d'you figure?"

"Oh c'mon, Jim. That one's easy too." House knocks his knuckles lightly against the ice-filled water jug, as if he knows exactly what generational hand-me-down _he_ has just put on show. "You're not the only one who didn't grow up playing Happy Families."

_No, of course not. _Rather than make it easier, that knowledge makes it harder to admit. But, at length, he dips his chin toward his chest in a single nod.

"He used to try to teach me a lesson."

House examines what Wilson hopes is his own impassive expression with a similar neutrality. He speaks dryly:

"He succeeded."

There's enough feeling in the tone that Wilson ought to look at him. House's compassion is a mythical entity, rarer than a unicorn and twice as likely to kick at one end and impale at the other. But his shame is so acute that he looks away, stares at the window instead of through it. Behind the quavering curtain pouring from the edge of a blocked gutter outside, their faces are trapped in the glass. Rain cascades like tears down their cheeks. He remembers trying to teach House a lesson or two.

_It had been raining all day. His car impounded, his accounts frozen, his bus fare borrowed from Cuddy, Wilson let himself into House's apartment. Soaking and exhausted, he picked his way through the wreckage left when Tritter executed his search warrant. Each step, each carelessly overturned object he righted on his way, made the rest of the place look untidier, made him feel more violated. Their home, his sanctuary after the disintegration of his last marriage, had been torn apart and, once again, he was the only one left struggling to hold things together._ It's not good enough, James. _His father's voice had become his own internal one of continual self-reproach. _You're not trying hard enough.

_"Given up yet?" _

_House loomed out of the doorway to the corridor. His face was gaunt, shiny with the DTs, his eyes red-rimmed. He'd been cutting his arm again and the haphazard bandage work covering the wounds snarled his exasperation. The gating mechanism wasn't working. _

_"You can't win this," he declared, limping over. A book spine cracked under his feet, a first-edition, Wilson's gift, disregarded. "You're not strong enough. You'll give in in a day or so. Just get it over with and give me my pills."_

_His voice was low and feral. He prowled unevenly around Wilson, crunching their belongings underfoot. A materialist, hoarding possessions to make up for the fickleness of people, everything House cared about was trampled on the warpath of his addiction. He was sick with it, oscillating wildly between pitiful and threatening. Helpless in the face of it, intimidated by what it did to his friend and what it would do if it continued unchecked, Wilson steeled himself and stood his ground. _

_"I won't. You need to open your eyes and pull yourself together, House. You're not functional any more. You can't tell me this isn't a problem."_

_"This," House insisted, "is _your_ problem."_

_"You're detoxing," Wilson countered, steady, but increasingly serious. _

_That damn narco cop had been looking over his shoulder all day. He was risking _everything_ for House, his reputation, his career and his medical license, even his liberty. But he'd gamble it all – willingly – if it would just make the man get some help._

_"I'm in pain!" House snarled, not listening._

_He snatched Wilson's briefcase and upended it, searching through it for a script he might have missed, pad or pill bottle, anything he could get his hands on. _

_Wilson flexed his wrenched wrist and shouldered past him, muttering tiredly:_

_"Yeah, well. Aren't we all?"_

_His briefcase whistled past his ear. He ducked and spun, no longer startled by House's explosive outbursts, but forced onto his back foot. Defensive, Wilson's hackles and hands came up, palms out, shoving at the air as if he could, without touching, force House to back down. He was torn between the habitual urge to placate and a rush raw of instinct that demanded he man a counter-attack. _

_"Do no harm!" House roared at him, hurling Wilson's empty coat too. He slapped it aside. The wet fabric stung his cheek on the way down. "Walk fifty yards in my sneakers, Wilson, and tell me you aren't violating your precious Hippocratic oath!"_

_"Try walking anywhere in mine!" Wilson yelled back, kicking aside the coat. It fell spread-eagled, a fluttering cotton outline of something deceased, or dying._

_Frustration propelled him across the room to meet House head on amidst the wreckage of their lives strewn across the lounge floor. As more bits and pieces shattered beneath their feet, he couldn't fight the certainty that House didn't care. That _nothing_ he could ever do would be good enough to fix the damage being done by House's addiction. That _he _wasn't good enough. Something at the centre of him snarled in defiance._

_"What the hell does it take to get through to you?" Wilson went on, snapping now, struggling to reason past the thrum of angry desperation. "You're not the only one this is hurting here!"_

_"Aww, poor Jimmy," House turned vindictive, pseudo-sympathetic, baiting. "It must be so tough. No car to drive. All that desk-jockeying wear you out so it's hard work to get to the bus stop?"_

_Wilson clenched his teeth and fists together, spat out: "Damn the car! My _patients_, House! My DEA number's been suspended. I've got to put my practice on hold—"_

_"_I'm _your patient!" House interrupted, selfish to the hilt. "Right now you_ should_ be suspended. You suck as a physician! And as a boyfriend. Give me my fucking pills or get out!"_

_Wilson wheeled, wide- eyed, to stare over the piano at the window, where the downpour was ramming against the glass. The storm was all around them. Armies of slithering shadows gathered at their flanks. It was dark, darker than its should have been. The only light came from a broken lamp, its beam flung between them like a gauntlet._

_"And go _where?_"_

_A park bench," House said nastily, hawking his enunciation. "Go find your brother and share his cardboard box. It's about your level, right now, isn't it?"_

_The air whistled again. Wilson's fist exploded with pain and came back to his side, scarlet. He stared at House's profile as he staggered, right leg buckling, then slowly, steadily, straightened up. Blood pounded in Wilson's ears and a vindictive sense of victory, black and glorious, coiled his muscles in readiness for another round._

_It took him several seconds to realise what he'd done. Again._

_"Oh shi—House…" Wilson whispered it, the name sounding closer to the curse he'd castrated._

_House tossed his head up and turned to face him. There was no shock in his eyes, like there had been the first time. No hand to the mouth and mildly impressed smirk when Wilson scrambled to apologise. There was no evasive recoil, like there had been the second time he tried to patch up a punched lip either. There was no silent swivel and the sullen snap of a closing door between them, like the four or five times it happened after that. This time, House grinned at him, all triumph and bloody teeth._

_"Coward," he taunted. "Now you have to give up."_

_The last few times that was exactly how had gone; Wilson would do anything to make it up to him. That streak of enabler in him had been half the cause of the drug problem in the first place; but now there was too much, much too much, at stake. Wilson closed his sagging, stunned jaw and squared his stance._

_"The hell I will," he repeated, voice shudderingly quiet. _

_House took a vigorous, challenging step toward him and Wilson's adrenals opened fire. The rage took charge of him abruptly. He felt his face resculpt itself into an implacable mask. His world condensed into a relentless cavalcade of driving steps and oppressive words. _

_"I'm not going anywhere, either," he announced, advancing on House steadily, a little thrill of authority quickening his pace when House tensed, then took a step back. "It's not me that's out of line here, House. It's _you_. You're the one who has to give up. You're the one being a crappy boyfriend and a damn questionable doctor, too. _You're_ the one with a problem. _You_ get out until you solve it."_

He doesn't clearly remember grabbing House, shoving him out of reach of the cane hooked over the moulding. He doesn't remember much of the struggle as he manhandled him to the door, growling those words in his ear. He doesn't really remember the satisfaction of the final shove that sent House staggering out through the main door and onto his knees on the stone doorstep.

He does remember slamming the main door closed and House staring up at him through the little window, wide-eyed and haggard and suddenly young. He does remember the sight of House's keys, wallet and cell phone indoors on the coffee table, when he stood on top of it to disconnect the wires to the doorbell. He remembers the plummeting shock of fear as he got down and stood alone in their apartment, the rage gone as suddenly as it had come, leaving him cold and sick and too afraid to rush out after House into the tumultuous night to try to make amends.

He remembers being sure that House would stalk off and sulk in his office.

He remembers fretting in bed, listening to the heavy splatter of the rain on the road and dozing fitfully to wake to a sodden red dawn.

He remembers making breakfast, getting dressed and heading out to work.

He remembers stopping short when he encountered House curled upon the drenched stoop, surrounded by burned out cigarettes, and both hands skeletal as he clutched at his spasming thigh.

Most of all he remembers the hard set of House's face as he hastily helped him to his feet and that House went to work in his wet clothes.

He remembers realising, with certainty as chilling as if he'd slept in the rainstorm himself, that he would never be strong enough to teach House a lesson.

He remembers swearing to himself that, whatever it took, he would have to try.

Even if it meant following in his – and in House's – father's footsteps.

_And that_, Wilson reminds himself miserably, _is one of the better times I lashed out_. _Or, to be more accurate, one of the times I had some sort of excuse_.

Across the table in the café, House, unmolested by such memories, is idly drawing simple shapes in the condensation on the water jug, waiting for him to speak.

Wilson clears his throat and prepares to sacrifice his own child-self on the Formica altar for House to do with whatever he will.

"My father…" he says slowly, finding it hard, even now, to summarise the complexity of their relationship in simpler terms. He stops and starts again. "You told me, once, that your father was an insane moral compass – emphasis on the insane. Mine …mine has ludicrously high expectations. He sees what people can be and not what they are—"

"Be the best you can be," House interrupts, parroting a military line with scathing accuracy.

"Or the best _you_ can be," Wilson corrects, the derogatory inflection falling easily into place.

House's face changes. The bitter wit folds away and lines reshuffle themselves until he is almost expressionless. It reminds Wilson of his therapist, of the quiet mask he wears, devoid of judgement, empty of emotion. On House it makes him falter; that blankness is the guise House wears when he empathises. He will judge Wilson on this. His medical diagnosis has become irrelevant. This part will decide his fate, sign it, seal it, deliver him straight up to the gates of wherever House now wants him to go. Home or jail or hell; Wilson no longer thinks he has any right to refuse.

He spins a teaspoon around on the tabletop, feels as though it's gouging out his insides, and continues, tensely, faltering over a tale he was harshly taught not to tell.

"My father wanted the best for me," he says, a sigh catching on the edges of the words, tearing apart, and tumbling raggedly through his teeth. "And he had strong ideas about what the best should be. I've spent my life disappointing him.

"You've met him, so you know how he thinks. You were at my second wedding. You heard the speech he gave: _Congratulations, James. Don't screw it up this time."_

His eyes close for a moment as he feels again the awkward pause, sees the coruscate champagne glitter in its glass, duplicate in his stinging vision, promise him another failure, before the obligatory applause. He'd been imagining his next divorce hours after walking down the aisle. He clears his throat and mind roughly.

"It was always like that. He _wanted_ to be proud of me, but everything I did, he insisted I could do better, nothing I did ever quite made it up to his standards and he made a point of telling me in every possible way he could. He was thrilled when I became a doctor. Disappointed when I chose to be a physician instead of a surgeon, like him. Disgusted when I became an oncologist." He drops his voice an octave again, repeats verbatim. "_It's not a profession one can talk about at dinner, James._"

He shakes his head, speaks as himself again.

"It was never just about how much of a success we – me and my brothers – could make of ourselves. It was always about how it _appeared._ So, even if something was brilliant, if it didn't immediately look that way, it wasn't good enough. It was like that with people too. It was hard to tell where the front began – the nice, polite, charming doctor and hardworking husband, a little gruff with his kids, very strict, but _so pleased_ with them – and where it ended: the sarcastic, feelings don't matter only the results, surgeon; the why is dinner late, why haven't you dusted the mantel, what have you been doing all day, nitpicking husband; and the bellowing disciplinarian."

House's mask is still in place.

"He was like this with your brothers too?"

Wilson shrugs, almost lets a half-truth stand as a lie. Then he realises House isn't above pulling David's medical record too or talking to Danny at the asylum.

"I guess. He was critical of all us. Always putting us down, trying to push us to do better."

He feels the weight of House's scrutiny, boring into the top of his head, as though he can laser off the top of his skull with the intensity of his regard, unearth the details directly from Wilson's brain. He doesn't know if House speaks the prompt or if he just imagines it.

_But?_

Unconsciously, he hunches his shoulders, draws in on himself.

"He was harder on me. I think. Maybe that's just how it felt. I-I don't know for sure." He does; but he hasn't come to terms with it. He excuses it, weakly. "There were a lot of closed doors in our house. When he was really angry with one of us, he used to deal with us separately. He'd tell us off in front of one another, but if he was furious he'd take us away into another room."

He hears the bench creak as House shifts, remembering the proto-fights that would rumble around them all day, waiting for an empty room and a closed door to be unleashed.

"And then…" Wilson shrugs a second time, not needing to explain. House has experienced it, once removed.

His stare is steady, blue and blunt.

"What did he do to you?"

Wilson's eyes skitter toward the water jug, the bobbing chips of melting ice, the cell phone shivering against them. He shakes his head, more abashed by what he'd induced in his father than he knows how to handle.

"Nothing creative." To his mind, House's father did much worse, calculated, military punishments, to be doled out to adult men, not pre-pubescent boys. His own father had simply reacted, unplanned and unrestrained. "Flat of his hand."

The silence prompts him again. He squirms, reluctantly goes on.

"Closed fist sometimes… Belt… Usually the belt… Buckle end… He used to thrash me." He shakes his head, suddenly, breaks off. "House, c'mon. You've got my medical file. You don't need me to say this."

"You don't get broken fingers or ribs from a belt buckle."

House, evidently, wants him to. Wilson winces, resumes.

"I fell off a climbing frame, officially, and closed my fingers in a car door." He laces his fingers together, pulling at them, feels the ache of the old breaks. "Not so officially, it was steel-toed boot. And a slammed drawer. His office door, one time. A bottle. Eventually, his walking stick."

He shrugs violently, heaving the weight of his baggage off, and falls silent, finished. He waits for a dismissal: a flick of a hand and a yawn of _boring_. It is, in the scheme of things. His father wasn't imaginative.

House's continued silence unsettles him. He finds himself trying to solicit a reaction, murmurs the one thing about all this that he still doesn't understand.

"He didn't do it to my brothers. I asked David, a couple of times. Dad never hit him. He said he didn't even know why he would've hit me. Told me I was a good kid, but I must've done something each time to set him off. And I don't think Dad ever had the patience to reprimand Danny. He shouted sometimes, but Dan shouted back or switched off or started screaming. Mom wouldn't let him alone with him. It was…" He raises his hand to rub the back of his neck, half-consciously massaging away the whiplash ache that lingers there from dozens of concussive strikes across the back of his skull. "It was just me."

House speaks, finally, quietly.

"You were his favourite."

Wilson jerks his head up and stares at him, sure that must be some kind of spiteful jibe. But House's face is set into lines of ruthless honesty. Wilson shakes his head, a choked sound of disbelief escaping him.

"_What?_"

"Think about it," House observes, with gruelling logic. "David's a lawyer, married, two-point-four kids, picket fence, yadda, yadda; but it's not your father's dream, is it? He's successful, yes, but he's hardly high-flying. His wife's his secretary, for God's sake. And Danny's bouncing off rubber walls in a sleeveless jacket. You told me yourself: your father makes two visits to him a year, checks on his medication, does a psychological assessment and leaves. Doesn't speak to him otherwise. The schizo kid isn't someone to brag about to the dinner guests either.

"But you. You were always the one with the potential. You're handsome, charming, _smart._ Fast track in high school, skipped a year in college, graduated early, in _his_ profession. You even look like him, more than either of your brothers. He was living through you again, wanted to do all those things he didn't do the first time around. He held you to the same standard he held himself. The best you could be was the best—"

"_He_ could be." Suddenly, _finally_, Wilson understands. His heart twists with a mixture of grief and resentment, as he fits together the last pieces of his own puzzle: "Mom used to come to me afterwards, stroke my hair, patch me up. She always said he was harder on himself than he was on any of us."

He runs his tongue over his teeth, reflecting, thinking of himself as his father's reflection, and imagining it disintegrating into useless pieces before the man's very eyes.

"I guess every time I did get something right, I gave myself further to fall."

It's House's turn to shoot him a look of pure astonishment.

"You don't hate him, do you?"

Wilson shakes his head.

"No. _No._" He can't countenance the idea at all. "Whatever he did to me, House, he's still the man that taught me to play tennis, who came home late from work only to sit up with me helping me revise for exams, who taught me to whip-stitch when I thought I'd never get my head around it. He was hard on me, yeah, but he helped me a lot too. I hate disappointing him."

House makes an incredulous sound under his breath. "You never disappointed anyone else, Jimmy. Ever occur to you that the common denominator in your so-called screw-ups was him?"

"I did," Wilson defends immediately. "My wives—"

"The soulless harpy? The drivelling ditz? And that cold fish Julie? Otherwise known as Repression, Denial, and Oh Gawd Not Again."

Wilson will _not_ smile. It's not kind and it sure as hell isn't appropriate.

He takes a deep breath, says soberly: "_You._"

House waves that away as nonsense.

Wilson insists. "I swore I'd stop hurting you. I never did."

"What've the last two years been?" House demands, checking his pill bottle with exaggerated concern. "A hallucination? Seems like you stopped to me."

He peers down inside the neck of his shirt next, searching for bruises. As if all the damage Wilson ever did to him was external, transitory. Wilson doesn't call him on it. He made a habit of robbing House of his shields; if his demented humour is all he has left, he should keep it.

"I stopped far too late," Wilson points out in sepulchral tones. "I should never have _started_."

House lets his sweater neck twang back into place and rolls his eyes.

"Don't act the idiot. You didn't make me _the late_, so it doesn't count as _too_ late. You're not the only one who screwed _us_ up, Wilson."

Wilson holds up both hands, defensive again, trying to scoot that away. Whatever House's faults, and Wilson's not blind to them, it's taken him too long to conscience his own culpability. It's all _he's_ got left now: remorse and responsibility. He should carry it too. He came to _give_ an apology to House, not let him _take_ the guilt away.

"I let you down," he repeats, determinedly. "Just like I let my father down."

House has been fidgeting with a doily. He's folded it into a pyramid and plonks it abruptly down in front of Wilson.

"Paper hat for the pity party?" he rebutts, sardonically. "Your father let _you_ down. Don't you _see_?"

Wilson hesitates over it; he can't quite fit it into his world picture.

"I misunderstood the lessons, that's all. Sometimes you learn what to do from other people, sometimes what _not_ to do. I just…never figured out how to deal with conflict. You know that better than anyone. I was stupid. I—"

He sucks in air, steels himself to go on. Having to repeat it over and over at anger-management groups hasn't made saying it any easier.

"You bottle it up," House interjects. "And then you explode."

"Yeah." Wilson sighs and repeats the line the shrink has been feeding him, as if it will bind together the unsteady fragments of the world he's been trying to put back together for the last two years. "_It's my fault_."

House sits back with a scowl of irritation.

"I take it back. Your father's right. You're a complete _moron._"

That hurts. But it's meant to. Meant to make him see himself in some other way. Wilson rubs a hand over his eyes, wrung out from twisting and turning inside to look at everything differently, from always being either wrong or in the wrong. The exhaustion that dragged at him every night of his childhood and adolescence, when he came down from the anxiety high of striving to prove himself, sweeps over him in a wave. The tears he used to cry into his pillow from sheer weariness and self-doubt are not far behind. He swallows them back, but feels the thickness of them in his throat, as he realises they've reached the end of the autopsy.

"Yeah, well. We are what we both are, I guess. There's only so much that can be changed, in the end."

House rolls his pill bottle between his fingers, pensive. He ignores the cue to fumble their way through a formal farewell. Wilson hesitates, wondering if he'll offer some cynically sage piece of snark to ease it. When House doesn't, he tries again.

"Puzzle's done, House," he says huskily and, for want of something more poignant to add: "Thanks for the coffee."

That brings House's head up, sharp enough. He stares at Wilson in outright disbelief and doesn't move from his seat.

"That's it?" he demands, with more amazement than he has any right to after all that's gone before.

Wilson's lips stir in the hope of finding words that will somehow make them both sure of it. This is it. What they both came for. Closure.

"You've got your answers," he says gently. "That's all you care about; that's why you came. It's why _I _came…"

He tails off, thinking he'd _like_ to ask House a few questions in turn, check to be sure that's he's going to be okay; but he's probably better off simply for being away from Wilson. The chance to explain is already more than he has earned.

He banishes the thoughts and finishes: "Thank you – for letting me apologise."

"I don't care about your damn apology!" House retorts, sharp enough to startle him.

His sudden harshness sits Wilson upright, brings a flare of colour to his face. He should've known House would try to leave it on a fight, quick and painful. He checks himself mentally, determined to hold back.

"I _care_," House reprimands him, "About the puzzle."

Wilson blinks, unsure what to make of that. The puzzle is complete. He's held nothing, much, back and what he has House can't possibly know about. But the tone denies closure, all the same. There's something almost _too_ hard about it, rough and raw and impetuous. House's frontline defence against core vulnerability. Wilson guesses he's determined to prove it to himself. Meeting again was hard, but parting, strangely, is harder still. In spite of the savage quarrels, and the reflexive hatred after, they loved each other once. The ache of it is so fierce, like fingers under his ribcage, as if his heart is physically in House's hands, that he's finding it hard to believe that there's any _once_ about it.

He stares down at his reflection in the teaspoon again and searches for a sign that something has changed, that his eyes are a little less tired or his face a little less thin with regret, any small sign that would give him the strength to stand up and simply say goodbye. He finds nothing and that holds him a little longer in his seat. If he hurts, it serves him right, and, show or bury it, House must hurt too. He's far too guarded a man to have ever loved easily – and neither one of them was ever any good at letting go. Wilson owes it to him to let House make the break any way he needs; if it knocks his own recovery for six, well, payback is a bitch.

House leans across the table, bridging the artificial divide that they've carefully kept between them.

"You _idiot," _he says voice, low, antagonised and crackling with intensity. "You _are_ the puzzle."

Wilson looks up, startled, from burying the teaspoon under a damp napkin. But, before he can make head or tail of what House has just said, House snatches the napkin off him and grabs the spoon, staring at it with a fixation that Wilson remembers altogether too well.

"Why d'you do that?"

Wilson shrugs. He can hardly admit he can't stand to look at his own reflection, that he sees no progress from today, only the shadows of his father, and another failure.

House pulls the spoon out and holds it up between them. He stares at it as their images distort on either side of the head. Wilson sees them as clownishly fat on the convex, fools and jesters; skin and bones on the concave, skeletons of the _danse macabre_. They are fools to be here; it's fatal to each of their psyches and self-esteem.

House sees something else. The spoon hits the table with a clatter and he vaults onto his feet.

"Prosopagnosia!" he exclaims, not so much to Wilson as to world in general, bewildering the other occupants of the café. "My patient couldn't recognise himself in the mirror!"

He scrambles to get out of the booth and Wilson sits back quickly, tucking his legs out of the way. It's so familiar he almost smiles, except it feels as though he's being kicked in the groin. _This _is it. The closure he'd been searching for. It's here. Now. The last he'll see of House is spontaneous cane-propelled cavalry charge through the tables. It's better, he tells himself, than remembering him broken and bleeding on the carpet. But House surging off in a delighted storm of inspiration is bittersweet. Wilson's glad he had a chance to make amends. He regrets that to do so he also has to, finally, say goodbye.

"Wilson! _Hey! __**Wilson!**_"

He turns his head, taken-aback, but wondering why he hadn't expected an exit-line. House has stopped by the door to mug a waitress of her notepad and pen. His fingers move like lightning. A few seconds later, a paper aeroplane arcs through the air. It crash-lands in Wilson's outstretched hands.

Wilson unfolds the paper. He stares at the line of digits scribbled on the plane's wings. His head snaps up in gaping astonishment. House is looking back from the threshold. Rain and wind whip his hair into wild disarray and his whole face is alight with reckless, adrenaline-addicted, daring.

"When you get a new phone," he shouts over the incurious crowd, "_Call me!_"

TBC…


	7. Chapter 7

**Part Six:**

His phone peals in the middle of an email consult. House snatches it up, still rattling away at the keys. It's surprisingly hard to type i-g-n-o-r-a-m-u-s one handed; the letters should be closer together or there should be predictive text for computers too. It's his pet name for all other so-called professionals.

"Yeah? What?"

He was due in the Clinic forty minutes ago. Nurse Previn has rung twice to nag him. Third time is not the charm.

The voice on the other end isn't the one he expected.

"This is a vice, isn't it?"

House smiles as he scoots his keyboard aside. He leans back in his overstuffed office chair and hoists his legs up onto the desk, making himself comfortable for another long call. Clinic can go hang.

"Yup," he says cheerfully. "My one-way ticket to hell, Jimmy. Of course, since we're both already going there, it's not strictly necessary. I just want to make absolutely sure I'm cancelling out all the lives I save, so there's no chance Saint Peter will try to switch my pass for one to the pearly gate."

The pattern of breath changes on the other end of the line. Not quite a laugh, it's hard to get one of those out of Wilson these days, but he's definitely smiling. House pauses, waits for him to finish his own thought.

"Ah," Wilson muses. "And here was me thinking that the sex, drugs, rock and roll equation was starting to look a little bare – you know, now you've only got your guitars left."

If he weren't holding the phone, House would start to applaud. He's figured it out.

"You quit Vicodin, didn't you?" Wilson goes on.

_Bingo._ The inflection in his voice means it isn't really a question. There's a note of confidence there too, which House likes more than he was expecting. He's never _tried_ to be a puzzle to anyone before. He keeps all his damage out on the surface, some forlorn hope that someone, anyone, might understand, might help him climb out of the wreckage. It's like a kiddie's party invite that no one ever RSVP'd to. Most people can't even figure themselves out.

Most people are idiots.

"Tit for tat?" he hazards. "You break into my files too?"

"Strangely, no," Wilson drawls, all sarcasm and lingering smile. "I've had my medical license confiscated once already; it wasn't fun. Besides – dear boy – I didn't need to."

He clears his throat, imitates House imitating Sherlock Holmes, bad British accent and all.

"Three months ago, when we met at Richard Stockton, you took tablets from a white plastic bottle not the amber vials used to dispense prescription medication. That means that you were using OTCs. You'd scraped the label off with your thumbnail, which means you were fidgeting with the bottle constantly, not just because you find the rattle of the pills reassuring, but because the dosage wasn't strong enough and you took it out on the branding to avoid reminding yourself of that every time you looked at it, adding insult to the original injury. Also, the tablets that you took weren't the same size or shape as your Vicodin or as each other, which means you were mixing types of OTC.

"Rehab would have tried to switch you over to ibuprofen for the inflammation, which you would have had to have accepted to get discharged. Except you know that among ibuprofen's listed side effects is the risk of myocardial infarction. You would have, either independently or by consulting a different pain management specialist, concluded that if you take aspirin too it acts as a blood thinner, countering the risk posed by the ibuprofen. And since we've already established that you have zero respect for your liver…"

He trails off significantly, his voice a complex mixture of wryness, exasperation, and resignation. House releases a breath he hadn't realised he was guarding; quickly, he covers the mouthpiece to keep his relief concealed. He can't remember the last time they could talk about his pain _mis_management without something breaking: bones, lamps, the sound barrier.

"Also," Wilson continues, again affecting the accent he had let slip. It renders him remote and reserved. The hell is that little island's accent quaint or hot; his voice has become a villain's. Instant B-movie bad guy. "The last three times we've met for coffee, you've been leaning more weight on your cane and you swing your right leg through more stiffly than you used to. That indicates a problem with your hip. Last week, you'd started to wear a brace on your right wrist and you kept rolling your right shoulder. All of those point to compensation damage, suggesting the original injury has flared up."

House swirls the helical cord around his finger. His throat is arid. He looks that weak, does he? Is that the attraction?

"House?" Wilson's voice is his own again, vaguely worried.

"Excellent deduction, mine furrier," House snaps out. "Bit Jewish to be Tuskeegee, aren't you, Watson?"

Wilson snorts. "I did not sound German."

He's quiet for a moment, then, tentatively.

"House, how bad is it?"

House sucks his teeth. He picks up his lacrosse ball and bounces it restlessly against the wall to the DDX room, narrowly missing the sprawling LCD flatscreen mounted on the wall. He catches the ball, considers the brand new television thoughtfully and says:

"You know when you buy a TV, it comes with a manual?"

"Yeeeaah."

He can hear Wilson frowning, but he's used to House's extended metaphors.

"Those manuals are always written in a language that is—"

"Almost completely unlike English?"

House nips the inside of his cheek, almost completely not quite _smiling._

"It's English translated from Chinese, via Hindi, Swahili, Finnish and Dutch, by a person who is only conversant in Portuguese."

He listens to himself for a moment. No, he's not _at_ _all_ pissed that he can't get cable connected yet. _Or_ that he's down one Vicodin-substitute: analgesia by distraction.

"Turns out that if you translate via the exact same pathway, Mayfield is American for Auschwitz. That moron Nolan medicates based on guess work."

Wilson is not one for cursing, but something about the quality of the pause sounds like an oath. House wonders if he pushed the metaphor _too_ far. Wilson is Jewish, after all. There's an inherited sensitivity there, although it takes a really big, really _friendly_, family for everyone to have some directly personal connection to the oversized Easy Bake ovens.

He realises what he's doing, then, and catches himself on the brink of saying this out loud. Button-pushing. Provoking. He's not looking for anything as constructive as a debate; he wants a fight, to retaliate for the unending ache in his leg. History hurts. He wants to control _how._

_Needs_ to control it. He tightens the cord, choking off the blood supply to parts of his finger. The black wire cuts white lines into his flesh. The segments between them bulge red, trapped in a web. A web of Wilson's lies? Why does he care, right now? What's he using it _for_?

House rubs his knuckles into his forehead, trying to shut down the analysis – the _over-_analysis, his shrink would say. Wilson's always cared; he can't help himself. It's pathological. He uses people's need to bind them to him. To control them. To make…reparations? House knows he's trying to goad his ex into reacting in some way he'd have to make up for, or to do, to say, something that would remind him, House, that the concern is only temporary. Real, or illusion, it never lasts. Like he said, history _hurts._

That actually does stop him. He's caught in his own lie now. Nolan never got him to believe that it was ever just an illusion. Wilson, damn him, always cared with a total lack of discretion. Couldn't keep it simple and just _pretend_. His caring was always as genuine as his anger.

Bastard.

And _still_ not boring.

House clears his throat and breaks the grimly introspective pause. He can practically hear Wilson kicking himself for prescribing for House for so long, for not tackling his addiction sooner, for trying to beat some sense into him. That one, as a pain management strategy was sort of counter-productive. The gating mechanism, distracting from one injury by creating a more severe one, is only a stopgap. He decides not to let on that it worked better than Wilson ever suspected.

"Your vices theory was better," he announces, some brass-balls bravery clanging in his tone as figures, what the hell, he'll test Wilson a little. The cripple's equivalent of ring the bell and run away. Taunt the caller and, if need be, hang up. "You're right, you know. I'm only hanging out with _you_ because without the drugs I'm short daily dose of adrenaline and endorphins. I figured I'd switch up sex, drugs, rock and roll for sex, drink, drop and roll."

There's an astonished silence on the end of the line. Then a laugh blurts its way out of Wilson's throat.

"I can't _believe_ you said that."

House chuckles, down and dirty and demolishing the butterflies.

"You've been away too long."

"About that…"

There's a hesitant catch in Wilson's voice and for a moment House feels like he's falling. He jerks in his chair and, instinctively, looks over his shoulder, certain Wilson is going to step in from the balcony or materialise through a door, catching him with his guard down.

"You're coming back here."

His voice is flat, his tongue metallic; for a moment he goes deaf with fear.

"—ouse? House? Are you still there?"

He's sat upright, legs swung down, finger is poised over the disconnect. He curls it back, stares at it, mildly annoyed, and forces his way past the panicked reaction.

"What? Sorry. Someone came in."

Yeah, to his _imagination._ He rolls his eyes. Like he ever needed monsters in his head. There were more than enough in his _life._ He himself is one of them.

"I said," Wilson repeats. "Would you like to come to Chicago this weekend?"

Okay. _That_ he was not expecting. House leans back slowly, hitches his right foot up to rest in the groove worn into one of the horizontal strats beneath his desk.

"It's-it's okay if you don't. If it's too soon. I just thought…"

He sighs and House can picture him again, without alarm, as if he's already in the next door office, sat in his leather chair, surrounded by all the trinkets and kitsch gifted to him by his cancer kiddies. He'd have his elbow on his old desk, the bridge of his nose pinched between his forefinger and thumb, while he knuckles at his frown lines in agitated concentration.

He sighs again and House hears the creak of his chair as he sits up. The behavioural ticks are so familiar that, for the hundredth time since Wilson left, the urge sweeps over him to quietly lay the phone aside and rise, hustle down the corridor and catch Wilson lecturing empty air. It's strong enough he's almost out of his seat before he remembers that Wilson is _in Chicago._ House sits back with a bump and a wave of sadness that hooks right under his ribs and jerks. He's dizzy with conflicting emotions.

"You had a thought?" he prompts, voice more husk-edged than humorous. "Is it lonely?"

"Bite me," Wilson grumbles and House snickers to hear oncology's finest orator reduced to sniping high-school repartee.

It has no impact on nervous-hopeful-curious – oh, fuck you, Nolan, who the hell cares? – knot in his guts. That tightens to the point that he's going to need surgery if Wilson doesn't say something soon.

"House, listen—"

"I'm all ears. I'm even waggling them—"

_Shut up._ Some hind portion of his mind gets it in first and Wilson echoes.

"Shut up—"

"Which, as I recall, I can do and you can't so _nyah!_"

_Shut_ up. You're babbling. Definition: to talk rapidly and incoherently in a way which people find irrelevant, usually through fear or excitement. _How about both?_ Synonyms: to jibber, jabber, gabble or pratter.

"_House._"

Squeezed out through Wilson's teeth, that. Stop. _Stop._ He can hear his new shrink's pseudo-casual suggestion: _Have you ever considered, House, that if you're going to test people, you might want to try not setting them up to fail?_

"Get on with it, Wilson. I'm just giving you a fanfare."

"Then buy a trumpet!" Wilson snaps, but there's no ire behind it. There's an odd quake in his voice, as if he's listing toward panic and House has actually caught him back with a joke, rather than pushed him off into the red end. He draws a shaky breath and speaks initially to himself. "No, stop. We keep doing this, joking around…but, at some point, we're going to have to talk."

Ah damn. He's not going to want to hear this.

Warily, House says: "We are talking." He unswirls the cord before his finger drops off and almost immediately swirls it back around again. He adds: "We do nothing but talk."

"I know," Wilson says, gently, warmly, _gratefully_. "That's really my point, House. We're calling each other five times a week – consults, requests, _pointless_ requests, and bouncing ideas while you bounce your ball, because you're dodging clinic duty, because you're bored, because I…" A pause, all shuttered eyes and thoughts; a sense of _too much, too soon, can't say_. A choked laugh covers it. "To cheer on opposing monster trucks when there's a TV marathon and debate what take-out to get while we're doing it. We've had coffee in some service station or in Newark airport every weekend since we met at Richard Stockton." He shifts nervously and House can hear the click of pens as he fidgets, rearranging his immaculate desk tidy. "It's been three months. We…we have to talk about what we're doing here. We haven't. Not after that first time. We can't keep pretending that we were never together. That we never broke up. We can't keep avoiding _why_ we broke up."

"Way to be direct there, Jim." House shoots for mockery, but it comes out tense and stifled. "You want to go ten rounds over…going ten rounds?"

"House—" Wilson sounds pained, but it's not half of what House feels. He narrows his eyes.

"Why've I got to come to Chicago for that? 'Cause it's just no fun if we can't form our own Historical Re-enactment Society? Need to stand on my throat one more time? Hoist your flag on my cane? Hey, I know, you could use your tie—"

"Stop. _Please._"

Polite, that, but the _fuck you_ comes across loud and clear. House stops before he can stop _himself_. He growls inwardly, then growls _aloud,_ and says:

"Sure you want to have this conversation? 'Cause right now all I've got is Clinic. What makes it worth a plane ticket?"

Wilson's quiet for minute. There's a fullness in his voice as he asks: "Isn't it worth that?"

House muses over the tone. A calculating note, sure, it's not like House has anything better to do with his weekend and Wilson knows that, he's not a stupid man. Question is: has House got anything _worse_ to do? Slam a car door on his ruined thigh, perhaps? Jump off the roof of the hospital? Accept one of Cuddy's never ending invites to hang out with her and the tedious hospital colleagues she calls friends? He chews it over, listening to the waiting static, background to Wilson's syncopated breaths. There's vulnerability there. So much. Too much to fake and in any case Wilson's not a fake. Even his personas practically have social security numbers. No wonder he got checked out for multiple personality disorder.

House sighs in turn, admits: "That particular conversation, no."

He hopes the specificity of his statement carries enough weight not to need intonated sacks of lead swinging from it.

Wilson licks his lips audibly, as if he's listening just as hard to figure out what House is thinking down the phone line and is offering counter cues.

"I didn't want you to fly up just for the conversation," he says, with enough hesitance that House's adrenaline spikes again. "I guess I-I was hoping that…afterwards …we'd still want to have coffee."

"Cappuchino over easy?" House rejoins, dry and thoughtless and not sure he's teasing.

Wilson's penchant for falling out of his pants and into a predicament is hardly a secret and House…well…he's got a streak of enabler in him too.

"I have a spare room," Wilson exclaims, somewhat hastily. "Or there's a nice hotel a few blocks away. I'd pay—"

"I'm not doing this on your dime," House retorts, flatly.

There was a time he'd've jumped on it, though. He frowns for a second, unclear if he's resisting a repeat of the kept butt-monkey saga or if he's genuinely trying to quit pushing Wilson to breaking point on every front from friendship to finances. _Fucking psychotherapy._ Whyever does Wilson want to spend _more_ time armchair analysing? It'll be all 'I' statements and self-help crap too. It used to be way more fun picking holes in each other. At least until they were picking teeth out of the carpet…

Wilson shifts again on the end of the line, abruptly now, as if he's about to hang up.

"I'm sorry. This was a bad idea. I shouldn't've suggested it. I guess if you're not ready to talk, then…"

Then what? House tightens his grasp on the phone, aware of something slipping. He flexes his hand immediately, drums his nails on the plastic, wonders if he's being manoeuvred.

"Then…?"

It's a good sign that Wilson _hasn't_ hung up; he's not trying to force House into calling him back. The lack of power play is…peculiar.

A few hundred dollars worth of suit rustles as Wilson shrugs ambiguously.

"I don't know…I, uh, I guess we could meet in New York instead. Have lunch?" Lightly: "_Not_ talk."

Did he just cave? House half hopes _this_ is Wilson's fine art of manipulative bitch coming to the fore, because otherwise he's entirely too defeated. The weight of the world is nothing to the weight of a Wilsonian guilt complex.

House leans forward slowly, clicks open a web browser on his computer screen.

Kidding, he says: "You bring your wallet, I'll bring the ball gags."

"Okay," Wilson agrees.

He sounds tired now, troubled and resigned. _Damnit._ House cradles the phone between his shoulder and his ear to tap in a web address. The sanctimonious ass is right. They _can't_ get past this one the way they've always done. Forgive and forget is a pipe dream, but shut the hell up and forget about it, no forgiveness required, used to work pretty well in the past. The past-past. The past before the other past. Before…oh gawd. The past before Wilson whopped his ass on a tri-weekly basis. The past where they were just friends.

Wait.

It would work if that were all they wanted to be.

Huh.

House watches the sand timer turn over and over on his monitor as the web page loads. Hospital system is on a go-slow. Like his brain, apparently. Wilson's been half a page ahead of him on this one for a while. He replays the resonances of Wilson's apprehension, his tentative invites, and enjoys the tune. Power Trip – the Return! Ohhh, he could play him like the rats of the Pied Piper – and all those little children. He could screw with Wilson...

…until he snaps and beats nine bales of shit out of him again? Unless House is willing to stump up for the bond to get Wilson out of the clink from his hospital bed, he's better off sparing himself the fucked up fairytale. Disney did a lot of editing and not just with that typo missing the u and the n off happily ever after.

Besides, if Wilson is back to being his original BFF then he's those loafers of his aren't as French as he thinks, 'cause instead of horny decadence he's going to be Dr. Goody Two Shoes again. And that is as dull as a Disney princess. Screw the script. And screw the shrinks too.

Wilson starts to speak again, before House has come up with a good line, patching over what he probably feels to be a pretty nearly irreparable hole in the conversation. Startled by just how long the silence has spun one way into near gold, the other definitely into stale straw, House braces for a rejection. An _I'd better go, House. Call me…if you want._ Instead, Wilson reaches out again, anxiously:

"We could go to a restaurant in Central Park. Or we could see if there's a game on – the Mets should be playing soon. Or—"

"You could shut up," House interjects, decision made, the urge to grin a little playing around the corners of his mouth.

Wilson tripping over his tongue has always been endearing and the thought of going to _Wilson's_ is… It's not an invasion. Not like it would be here. It's more of a conquest, but it doesn't _have_ to be a pillage, plunder and crush mission. It can be something that isn't old. Something new. Something…borrowed. Something _interesting._

"Chicago," House says into the surprised pause. "You can meet me at the airport."

When he hangs up the phone, three puzzled faces are watching him through the glass door into the DDX room. He catches sight of his own reflection and grins even wider. Their faces go from puzzled to downright darn scared.

Nurse Brenda thunders into his doorway and the smile disappears.

House ditches her at the elevator and does the same. Snotty Clinic patients can wait. He's got a date with some baggage.


	8. Chapter 8

"Self Harm."

House is lying on the cabin roof of Wilson's yacht when he says it. He's staring up at the sky. Wilson, habitually tidying ropes, pauses before he goes on resolutely stuffing them into the steel lockers under the thwarts. The sun is warm on the back of his neck and evidently the latest political wranglings are in full swing elsewhere, as winds are blustering enthusiastically over Lake Michigan, circling the little ship around her anchor. It's early on Sunday morning and they've swept out here on a vigorous breeze to moor up, appropriately marooned in a spot where, Wilson realises unhappily, if today heads off to hell the odds are good that no one will ever find their bodies.

The previous day was…easy, after the initial awkwardness and aborted handshakes in the airport terminal. They'd bickered over restaurants, wound up in some dive with a foosball table that somehow left the whole careless fiasco feeling more like a date than any wine and waiting staff could've done. House had scared half the patrons when he'd pulled out a pair of ball gags with the first course. Once Wilson had finished asphyxiating on his vegetable burger, they hadn't stopped talking.

They'd covered mundane topics, mostly. From the diner booth, to Millennium Park, through a pointless but entertaining trip up the Willis Tower to fake suicide attempts in the glass look-out boxes overhanging the endless drop to the city below, and finally to the leather stools at the bar of House's hotel, they'd blazed conversational trails through both of their caseloads and indulged in the usual workplace carping that House managed to turn into a stand-up routine. It hadn't felt once like there was a sword hanging silently overhead.

House's turning up in Chicago is a tacit agreement to talk, capital T, etc. It doesn't need admitting. He's undoubtedly been putting it off, but Wilson can't find it in himself to push the issue. He doesn't blame House for having wanted to save it until now, when he can, if need be, hop on the next plane out straight after. Here's hoping that he, Wilson, has enough control not to make it an Air Ambulance 'copter.

_What the hell am I doing? If I still can't trust myself…_

"Self harm?" he says in any case, because, really, that begs an explanation.

As if on cue the ship dips and rolls with a wave and his stomach lurches as he realised that this is it. No drum roll. No do-overs. _Lay on, Macduff. Damn, I hope one or both of us retains enough sense to know when to cry: hold, enough!_

House remains staring at the sky. His lips stir, shaping silent words. Thoughts? Profanities? A plea for lightning to strike from the brilliant blue? The odds aren't in his favour, seeking that as an out. In a human lifetime, the chance of getting hit by lightning is roughly one in six thousand. He's already become the one in every six men that is a victim of domestic abuse. With one report filed every minute in such cases, Wilson wonders how he ever thought that this weekend could end well.

"My shrink," House continues abruptly. "Cotton-picker turned brain-botherer that Cuddy conned me into seeing, as part of her big, bastardly, _Get Well_ gift – mandatory counselling and rehab."

The scathing tirade peters out into a quick lick of dry lips and a shadow crosses House's face that has nothing to do with the bird wheeling overhead. Wilson doubts Cuddy did much more than lay the suggestion on the table for the umpteenth time; House, finally, _chose_ to take it.

"He reckons it was a form of self-harm."

The pause is filled with the arrhythmic slap of waves beating against the hull of the ship and the gentle shish of hair as Wilson scratches his head.

"What was?" he questions.

House rolls over to prop himself up on his elbow and his eyes circle heavenward, impatient. Despite the dismissive intro, he has time for this shrink. Nolan.

"What I let you do to me, you idiot. It was self-harm. _That's_ why I missed diagnosing you—"

Wilson shakes his head, interrupts. He's done some thinking and a lot of talking to _his_ shrink since he and House first met; the urge to blame isn't quite gone, but he's got a better handle on it than before.

"No, no. Think about it. Everything in my medical history suggests that my tumour starting growing during puberty. At first, it got lost in the hormone surges. Then I…I guess it just wasn't quite big enough to make me lose control. You met me the first time I completely lost it – just after Sam sent me the divorce papers and I pitched a glass into the mirror over that guy at the conference rickrolling everyone with that goddamn Billy Joel song. It was the first time I remember getting that _angry_ – and doing something about it. Couldn't _stop _myself doing something about it. That was the night we met. You bailed me out of jail after the bar fight kicked off. You didn't even know me before I was sick. _That's_ why you missed it."

House hears him out, but there's a restlessness in the lines about his eyes and mouth, an arrogance that forewarns Wilson he's about to disagree.

"You got worse," House observes, not quite neutrally. "A lot worse—"

"It's a pattern. Once the cycle of violence starts—" Wilson breaks off, shaking his head grimly.

House snorts, noisily expostulates: "Of course it's a pattern! I'm a junkie, remember? It took the two of us to get here, Wilson. I was using you. _That's_ why I didn't see it. I needed you to keep doing what you were doing. It became…" he huffs, revolted with himself in a way that Wilson rarely sees. "Another addiction."

Wilson sinks down the nearest thwart, a rope falling forgotten from his hand. He can't process this.

"You _what?_"

A twitch and a flash of wary blue eyes at the snarl in his voice. Stifled fear. The pummelling of the waves has become the lash of Wilson's blood in his ears. His heart is beating so fast he feels light-headed. House's words are ferried to him on a quickening breeze.

"I was using you to get a fix."

Wilson stands again. Doesn't remember doing it. He swings on his heel and strides away, finds himself pacing the stern end of the deck. An inarticulate gesture is all he can manage. He needs to grab hold of something, to cover his ears, to yell. He tamps down on the urges and nearly ends up sinking to his knees under the weight of his thoughts.

_I know._

_You never loved me as much as you needed the drugs._

_After what I did, I can't blame you._

_After what _you_ made me do…_

Stop.

He thinks about saying it. Realises that it hasn't left his mouth. That some part of his brain is soundlessly shrieking it. This is dangerous territory. Too dangerous. He _has_ to accept full responsibility. Has to in order to ever come to terms with what he's capable of, the damage that he's done. Doesn't he?

Against his better judgement, he says tightly: "Go on."

House analyses him for a few seconds, gauges whether he's about to do more good than harm or vice versa. Unsurprisingly, he opts to find out.

"The first time you ever hit me wasn't long after my ketamine treatment wore off. We'd pissed each other off a dozen times before then – but it never had the same effect. Hell, I got you fired once and you weren't half as upset as you were at the thought of prescribing me Vicodin again. You didn't want to and I didn't – wouldn't – see another way to treat the pain. Except using the gating mechanism, of course. You caught me cutting myself, tried to stop me. I wouldn't be stopped. I got up in your face and—"

"I hit you." Wilson's voice is hollow.

House trumpets air through his nostrils – a scathing sound. "You _slapped_ me. Like a—"

"An abusive bastard."

"A _doctor._"

"No. I _pretended _that was the case—"

House interjected again, adamant. "_No_. It _was_ medical. Cold water on the face to rouse the unconscious. A slap to break shock. It's primitive, but effective."

"It's against the law."

"We weren't on the clock."

"Don't do this. Please, _please_, don't make up excuses for me. You never did before."

Wilson's throat is tight, one hand raised and balled into a fist, crushing the idea mercilessly. His mind fills with images of bathtubs, hot water and warm, wet, entangled limbs, his bloody hands massaging away House's leg pain after the storm on the doorstep or washing the grit out of an egg on his head. House had always been stoic when he did that, neither yielding nor resisting, but stiffly pliant. He'd been silent too, so silent, letting his wounds cut Wilson to the quick far better than any words could have done.

Until the next ones come out of his mouth.

"That was how it started. After that, I knew how it could work. Your guilt was…useful to me. If I gave you a reason to feel guilty – personally – then you'd give in and you'd get me what I wanted. And you hated yourself for it, because you knew the pills were hurting me worse than the smack upside the head you'd given me for taking them or cutting myself up in their stead. That made you angry, put you constantly on edge monitoring me, and you were easier to trigger. Starting the whole cycle over again for the next time I needed to set you off. The next time you tried to help me by manoeuvring me into detoxing."

House keeps talking, but he's lying stiller by the second, as though he can make himself invisible; yet there is no attempt to back away or down. Much as he dreads being the target, he's inviting the anger he's sure he deserves.

"You weren't wrong, Wilson. I _did_ make you do a lot of what you did to me. I knew what buttons to press and if those didn't work I shoved or hit you until you struck out to _defend_ yourself."

_Son of a bitch._

Unexpectedly, it hurts far more to know he was right than it did to believe he was wrong. No wonder House opted not to hurt himself if Wilson would do it for him; there's a shocking acuteness to the pain that's harder to adjust to than the dull-edged relentless abrasion of self-reproach.

"_God_," Wilson breathes, half-prayer, half-curse.

He grinds to a halt and digs at his eyes with the heels of his hands, overwhelmed. There are too many motives here. Too much mutual psychosis. Self-punishment. Pain management. Revenge and rage. A complex, calculated, a system of exchange. _You hurt me; I hurt you. _To and fro, to and fro; an unstoppable, unnecessary, unwinnable, game. Feeling sick he staggers against the roof and leans there, near to where House is still sprawled. He speaks through the hand he clamps over his mouth, heavy, breathless.

"You and I…we are _not_ good for each other."

House studies him, intense and suddenly much too close. "Neither is chocolate. Or coffee. You want to live without it?"

Wilson's hands slide from his face, his lips part, helplessly.

"What are you saying?" he murmurs, though he thinks he already knows.

House snorts and swats the words away as ridiculous. His calloused palm raises the hairs on the back of Wilson's neck. He tastes of spearmint and something oily that he's been chewing out from under his fingernails. Their mouths bump and push together, lips locking easily. Tentative tongues investigate. As one, they choose to remember other memories, those that didn't end in blood and bruises, but sweat and laughter.

Eventually, an overeager swipe garners House's chewing gum. Wilson chokes unexpectedly and they break apart, respectively chuckling and coughing. Wilson keeps spluttering as his eyes start to sting. His heart drops, sounding the depths of the dangerous waters they're over once again.

"House, _House_—_oy vey_, this is a bad idea."

He can't bring himself to disentangle, he clings to a fold of House's t-shirt, palm sliding over his warm, tanned skin. There's a laugh still trapped in Wilson's voice, but it's becoming sadder by the minute.

"We can't—we _shouldn't_— This is what happens. Everyone says so. It's…like it's a default. A reset button. It's still the big, red, here-be-the-destruction-of-the-universe button too. There's a great big label on it that both of our therapists _and _all of our—your—friends taped there. It says: Do Not Push. _Nothing's changed_."

"_Everything's_ changed," House cuts in. He swings his legs over the roof of the cabin and slides down to stand in front of Wilson, arms snaking assertively around his waist: "And _I_ do the metaphors."

"So I do what?" Wilson asks, somewhat unsteadily. Not to stretch any metaphors that he shouldn't be using, but if the world had any sense of pathetic fallacy the ship would be rocking at this moment; he feels as though he's losing his footing. "Steer the ship?"

"Fuck the ship," House mutters into his mouth and flattens Wilson against the deck.

* * *

Afterwards, they bask on their backs. The metal roof of the cabin is almost too hot through the towel that Wilson spread out there. The air smells of cigarettes and sea spray. Each deep breath of it is thick with the evaporation from the water they used to sluice down the deck; each inhale seems to pool it inside Wilson, down low. A breeze has got up and the fevered writhe of the ship on the waves recaptures the hungry push and surge of their bodies. Caught in the current, it bucks and swells, clumsy and delicious, threatening to cast off all restraints. Wilson couldn't get it up again, not so soon; but, as he turns his head to the east and sunlight shatters pale and liquid across the vivacious waves, his body quivers with a sudden aftershock.

House half-glances at him, then rolls over onto his belly. They hardly undressed and his open belt jingles as he moves. It pulls Wilson's attention to it, lengths of lax leather and the cruel-cornered solidity of the steel buckle. The hated sound of the prong rattling heralds the return of reality from the reckless, closed-eyes fantasy of t-shirts shoved up to taste and tease, palms fitted to hips, thumbs tracing the gullies of groins and the hot-smooth-hard grind of cocks in the interlocked grip of their fingers.

House flicks his cigarette away to be gulped down by the teeming tide. He nudges Wilson's shoulder with a bony elbow.

"Earth calling Jimmy. Do you want its new address?"

Wilson smirks, but it's habitual. He's starting to feel seasick, sordid.

"Can we get a restraining order for that, instead?"

House laughs, but Wilson shakes his head.

"We're idiots," he tells the foaming cumulous above. "We weren't going to do that."

"_You_ weren't," House corrects, still all idleness and afterglow.

That can't be right. House is never so easy to unwind. Half his mind is always at his whiteboard, puzzling, planning, plotting for his latest case. The breeze grows cold and Wilson sits up to stare at him, searching for tells.

"That wasn't _safe_," he says, sharp and suddenly scared.

Despite House's revelations, he can't forget that the man has stalked him for two years. He's driven him out of three jobs and five apartments. The crack about the earth _moving_ is just a little too glib, too close. He looks down at the drying deck and thinks the worst. It's been a long time. Until now, he's been safe but he hasn't celibate. House isn't always so careful and he isn't above settling scores.

"You're the boy scout," House retorts inflectionless, still watching his fag butt being digested by the water.

An over-shoulder glance catches the whitening of Wilson's face and House too sits up. His expression hardens, closes, alarmingly emotionless. For a spinning second Wilson's sure House will tell him he deserves it, feels himself sway and expects the crack of bone, though whether he will strike out or pass out he can't tell. Then House is sliding off the roof, limping away from him to stand at the bow. One hand tight around the taut forestay, he glares at the empty horizon.

"There's been no one," he says roughly. "Not since…. Without you, I'm alone."

Wilson hangs his head, giddy with relief and guilt. There's no apology he can make for what House knows he was thinking and he's no less scared. A half-dozen retorts snarl inside his skull, from the disgusted: _nice, I'll do because no one else will put up with you?_ to the vicious, corralling: _So._ _I'm all you've got. _But knowing he has the power to bring House back to him, under any terms he likes, appals him. Appals because it tempts him with the command of a situation that has become disorientatingly ambiguous. Appals him because it frightens him. He doesn't – he _never_ – knew what to do with that kind of power. It frightens him most because he knows now why he abused it like that.

"So am I," he admits, in a whisper, and cringes as it carries to House on the breeze.

* * *

They say nothing more. Instead, they spend the afternoon sailing in a strange sort of silence. It feels like closure, but Wilson doesn't want it to end. He doesn't turn the ship for home long after he should and House doesn't protest. They ghost past one another to work the ropes and sails and rudder, pretend not to notice the water turning crimson as it swallows the sun or the last beams of daylight become the reds and greens of port and starboard lanterns. House misses his flight.

It's full dark when he lights another cigarette, the flare of the match bruising his face with orange and shadow.

"Are you done?" he demands, rubbing his aching leg. "Acting as if there's a choice to make."

Wilson grips the tiller, shakes his head reflexively. It's freezing out on the lake now and he's starting to shiver.

"There _is_ a choice, House."

The match goes out and House's eyes gleam, bright and fearless. Sat near to a lamp, he's found the edge of a shadow and of doubt.

"Yeah," he shrugs. "But it's made. If it wasn't, I'd be in a cab in Princeton."

He would and Wilson knows it. They'd have made sombre but final farewells on the jetty; House wouldn't've even let him offer a ride to the airport. He keeps shaking his head anyway.

"I don't know if I know how to do this." He gasps as the breeze strengthens and twines around him, chills him to the bone. "I don't trust you. You don't trust me."

"Anyone who trusts anyone else completely wants their head examined," House says shortly. "This is us, Wilson. We know where and we know why we can't trust each other. We know more than we knew before. We can skip that part, come back to it."

All at once, Wilson knows that none of it took, that House blew off nine-tenths of his therapy, that he was released because he was sober, not because Nolan thought he was sane. That House is smart enough, or stupid enough, to have stolen only the bits he thought were of use. That he's hardly changed.

The urge to groan rumbles in Wilson's voice as he stalls feebly: "Isn't there a twelve step programme for this or something?"

"Cripple," House reminds him, gesturing to the cane he's abandoned on a thwart in favour of using the rails, roof and ropes to haul himself around. "I don't hop-step all over the place because anyone says so."

"Even me?" Wilson demands, to be sure.

He has even less faith in himself to maintain control than he did before House's revelation. He's taught himself to accept that House _wasn't_ being a manipulative bitch throughout the last two years of their relationship; he hasn't worked out how to adjust to the fact that he _was_.

House hesitates far too long for comfort. His answer comes pat, as if he knows it should.

"Especially you."

Wilson sighs, looks away across the violet water. The wind is getting up. The surface is choppy; their wake foams actinium white and agitated.

"Liar."

House's eyes gleam impishly. "Wuss."

Wilson bites his cheek to check a grin, then yields to the distraction of the old game, the familiarity and fun of ridiculous rituals and jousting, jesting affirmations of mutual affection.

"Jerk," he grumbles, a shine of unexpected tears brightening his own eyes as the smile breaks free.

"Ass."

"Manipulative bitch."

"Choking hazard."

"Hey!"

"Too soon?"

"Yes!" Wilson's glare doesn't hold. He jibes closer to home, retaliating: "_Bastard._"

"Ouch." House fakes a clutch at his chest, as if he's wounded. "Daddy's boy."

"_Ow,_" Wilson reproaches, meaning it this time. House takes it as a mulligan.

"Blowdried slickster."

"Oy!"

Caught up in their laughter, neither one of them hears the impending whistle of the gathering wind.

The squall catches them off guard. It smacks into the sails, which buck and swell. The tiller bites into Wilson's hand, fighting him. It wins and the _Solace_ heels hard to port. A dollop of water lunges over her coaming and House is pitched off the thwart. He crashes to his knees, cigarette squelched out against the damp deck.

"Damnit!"

Their voices sound together, startled and a little scared. Wilson's a novice yachtsman; he only began sailing when he came to Chicago, seven months ago. Fortunately, House seems to know his way around the rigging; one more secret in his endless store of skills and interests that preceded his infarction.

"Can you reef?" Wilson shouts, over the hiss of another roger gathering strength.

He gestures to the…thingamy that curls the bottom of the main sail up in on itself like a roller blind, limiting the scope of the wind to drive them.

House eyes the lurching cabin roof and lashing ropes.

"I'll steer."

He scrambles to his feet as Wilson leaps to his. The ship is small enough to be crewed by one man and he starts to turn her out of the wind, reaches for the main halyard. They're about to change places when the next squall strikes.

The _Solace_ reels over. Wind thrums and roars in the rigging. The deck bucks and House staggers, clutches the nearest rail. Wilson fights the gust, but the tiller plunges one way and the rope is hurled high the other. He hangs on to the first, looses the second. The halyard whirls through his hand, flaying his palm open, tearing skin. Still wresting for control, for a few seconds to reef – too damn late, he should've known! – he forces the tiller to starboard. The _Solace_ jibs viciously. Her sails flog; her boom hurtles across overhead.

"Heads!" Wilson yells and House ducks. Also too late.

The boom slams across. Wood strikes bone.

"House!"

The ship is reeling, rolling, and Wilson doesn't care. He flies across the slanting deck and drops to his knees. House sits up, swearing.

"Jesus, Wilson!" he yelps, "Get a hold of the ship!"

She's spinning like a top in a tempest, listing, golloping water over the side. They scramble together, gather the sails, force her into a nearby cove. Out of the worst of it, they eddy in a patch of sheltered water, perch face to face on the thwarts in the lamplight and examine each other's wounds. House has a goose-egg and a rueful look; Wilson bloody hands and a guilt complex the size of a continent. He runs a brief neuro test, then sticks his injured hand in the water before he lets House disinfect and bandage it up. It's rudimentary, as patching up goes, but the basics are better than nowhere as a place to start.

Wilson checks the reefing and sets a tiller line to help him hold her, before he returns the _Solace_ to her course. The ever-unpredictable wind has shifted direction. They tack back against it, making slow but steady headway. House fills two tin mugs with coffee and perches beside Wilson on the thwart.

"That wasn't an omen," he says.

Wilson swigs his coffee, eyes him askance. "No?"

House scoffs. "This isn't a romance novel, Wilson. Not every moment is a metaphor."

His fingers close reassuringly over Wilson's on the tiller. He holds them on course while Wilson sets down his coffee and burrows his face into his free hand, fingers raking through his hair as he racks his brain for sense and composure.

"We'd have to have ground rules," he says, at last returning to their abandoned conversation. His voice is firm in spite of the sense of inevitability.

House grumbles under his breath but doesn't let go.

"How about: you don't hit me? There, that should do."

"No," Wilson is adamant. "I need you not to push me so hard. You know my triggers better than I do—"

"Alright, alright." House sighs impatiently, takes command. "Here's the deal. I don't use you to prescribe for me. I don't use you to hurt myself. I'll do my best not to escalate when things get out of hand. I'll keep seeing my damn shrink to work on all of that and I'll let him keep charge of my medication regime."

He slurps noisily from his coffee mug and eyes Wilson over the rim, all slyness and challenge.

"I will not stop pranking you, faking consults to talk to you, doing my job the way _I_ do it best, and leaving all domestic duties to you."

Wilson bites his lip, tries not to laugh. This is, he reminds himself, far too serious. House has offered more than he expected.

"Fair enough."

He thinks for a few moments, debates what he can offer, what he would _like_ to offer and, finally, trades honestly.

"I'll keep seeing _my_ shrink for the PTSD and attend the anger management sessions: one group twice weekly and a one-on-one for at least the foreseeable future. I won't come off my medication. If something comes up that I'm not dealing with well or I need a long time to work through, I'll readmit myself to Horizons as a voluntary patient until I'm sure I can deal with it safely. I'll try to come to some sort of resolution with my family and, if I can't, apart from Danny, I'll stay away from them. I won't take charge of your medication, even if you ask me, and I'm going to avoid any kind of alcohol to be on the safe side."

House groans. "You going to start hugging trees and become vegetarian too?"

Wilson briefly considers it. House is teasing, but there are old wives' tales to suggest meat is contraindicated for a quick-tempered disposition. Then again, merciless mockery isn't recommended either and House has more than enough ammo.

"No."

"Great! That's settled—"

"Wait." Wilson isn't done. "For the time being, I stay working in Chicago and we take things _very_ slowly. Phone calls and weekends. We break _all _of our old patterns. That means we go places as often as you're fit enough for it: monster trucking, baseball games, sailing, driving, whatever. Anything that doesn't get us shut up in one place getting on each other's nerves all the time."

House rolls his eyes. "You wanna try couples counselling too?"

Wilson can guess how those sessions would go. They'd be at each other's throats in a hot second. He shudders.

"_No_. But if we start to get mad, we should take the conversation elsewhere, walk out to the park or go to a café, somewhere we _have_ to keep it calm—" He hesitates, remembers House is an exhibitionist, figures its more _his_ problem anyway, "—er."

House sighs, but doesn't object.

"Anything else, Dr. Phil?"

Wilson nods. "One more. You must've noticed that I haven't promised I'll never hit you again."

House's eyes sidle away from his. The lights from the approaching harbour pass across his face as they come about once more, leave it in shadow. He has.

"I can't promise that," Wilson admits. "It's been done now and I still don't always know what I'm doing when I get mad. It could happen again. I don't want to make a promise I might break to you. I owe you better than that."

House is silent. The lights of the harbour are full on them now. Wilson wonders if he looks as sad as he feels; House is devastatingly grim.

"Fine," he says stiffly and reads the pause well. "_But?_"

"I'll _try_," Wilson vows. "Always. Forever."

House shakes his head. For the first time since they started hanging out again, he looks tired, old.

"You nearly killed me, Wilson. That's not good enough."

"You nearly let me," Wilson reminds him, his heart aching. "I know it isn't." He adds, as gently as he can: "That'smy point."

The ship begins to slide through the harbour mouth; the wind drops; they're almost home. House lets go of his hand and they separate. The ship comes safely into dock.

_Now_ it's over. As he lowers the sails, Wilson's sure of it. He struggles with a fresh and frightening sensation that the only way off this desolate ship is to step off into the dark, ravenous waters.

"I thought of one more," House says suddenly, looking over his shoulder as he secures the warp.

Wilson gets tangled in a fold of falling sail.

"_What?_"

House nods, as if the conversation has ended nothing. His voice is too casual. "No hos, man. No other bros, either."

Wilson is flabbergasted and a little hurt. "I didn't cheat on you, House. You're the only one of my partners I didn't, but…it was _you._ I _never_—"

House's surprise catches him deep under the diaphragm, leaves him winded and stunned. He has to break off, recover his breath, before he adds softly:

"I'll stop throwing in your face that I could."

Then he remembers and goes on, painfully: "No more hookers."

House's eyes flinch shut. He nods, curt and guilty.

Wilson douses the lights and goes over to him. The boat has settled into lapping darkness. He flings their bags up onto the jetty.

"Why are we still talking about this?"

House climbs up onto the seat that runs inside the guard rail and, his back to the dock, hoists himself up to sit on the boardwalk, looking down under the strings of yellow lanterns that festoon the tall mooring posts.

"Because the choice is still made."

Wilson hands his cane up to him, shakes his head.

"It can't be. I can't promise not to hurt you."

House shrugs, rolling the walnut shaft between his palms. It doesn't catch the light. It's shadowy, almost invisible, as if it's hardly there. The solid click of it against the rail renders that an illusion.

"I can't promise not to let you either," House says. "So we're even."

"We're idiots, you mean. We _would_ be."

Wilson clambers up onto the jetty and stands, holding out his hand to help House to his feet too. House uses it to draw him closer. His heartbeat starts to quicken; they're close enough that he can feel House's through the thin barrier of their shirts, speeding up to match. Wilson's next breath shakes. He smoothes his hand down House's bristly cheek.

"We _can't, _House."

_God. I love you. I still love you so much. But that's_ why _we can't._

House lets go of him abruptly, pushes away.

"Then go," he says, voice harsh and clear and Wilson realises that, of the two, House is the one who is the least afraid of being alone.

He closes the gap himself, tentatively touching House's bicep, feeling the defiant clench of muscle through dusk-cooled skin.

"How do you know," he petitions quietly, "That we're not going to end up in exactly the same place, doing the same things to each other all over again?"

"I don't," House says simply. He hooks his cane into the bend in his elbow and his arms come up to wrap around Wilson's back. Their lips move together. House's shape the words: "We'll have to find out."

Wilson closes his eyes, kisses back with a desperate certainty that this should, this _must_, be the last time.

"The hard way?" he asks tiredly. "Been there, done that, got the orange jumpsuit. Do you _want_ to end up in the ground?"

House growls at him, grips both his upper arms, hard enough to startle him, bring Wilson's hands defensively up against his chest. True to his word, House doesn't escalate. He loosens his hold, but he doesn't back down.

"Do _you_ want to roll over and hug some hotline's moral at night? Because I don't want to be a domestic abuse charity's case again either, but I don't give a rat's ass what social propaganda is in vogue. Fuck the taboos, Wilson. This is you and it's me and _we don't have a social contract._"

Wilson fights past his fear and shuts House up with a kiss, fierce and forlorn. There are tears in his eyes as he leans foreheads together.

"Go home," he whispers, with a final kiss.

House huffs at him, bitter in defeat. "And what? You'll call me?"

Wilson shakes his head, barely, not enough to dislodge House's brow from his own. His hands slide up and down House's arms, measure the solid bulk of muscles, lets himself feel, _enjoy_, the wiry strength and arrogance of him. He hopes it isn't pure hubris in House and in him to take such risk on it.

"No," he promises. "Next weekend, I'll come and visit."

TBC…


	9. Chapter 9

**Part Eight**:

"I thought of one more," Wilson says over the phone on Monday morning.

House groans as he wrestles with the car door, his cane, and the cell he has clamped to his ear. After a late flight home, he's tired from a sleepless night chafing over what the hell he's just gone and done. He'd lain awake for a while, mentally beating himself up for the wild, hands over his eyes, leap of faith he'd taken going to Chicago. Then he'd got distracted beating himself _off _over the heated swollen sensitivity that had been pestering in his pants since he and Wilson quit the poncey yacht to suck face on the jetty. And _then_ he'd wondered what had possessed him not to stay in Chicago another night.

This morning, he's not in the mood for any more stupid, _sensible_, reasons not to do this. It's done. Case closed. Bedroom now.

"What?" he grumbles, shifting the phone momentarily away from his ear to grapple a snatching wind for the tweed flat cap he's wearing to cover the magnificent bruise the boom left on his forehead. "No red clothing, so I don't make myself look like a matador? No more sex before marriage? Because if it's that one you're shit out of luck, buddy. Prop Eight hasn't been overturned yet and there's nothing more annoying than blue balls—"

Wilson's chuckling and House can all but hear him rolling his eyes. From the click-click of a pen pirouetting between his fingers Wilson's at work, probably has been for several hours. It's after eleven. House is wondering if he can plead jetlag from an hour-long flight when Cuddy has her conniption fit.

"Go on," he allows, reluctantly.

"This isn't a don't," Wilson says, as if that's reassuring. "It's a do. We should've thought of it before. _Full disclosure_. We've got be honest that we're doing this, House. We should've been open about it from the start. We've got to talk to our shrinks, to your family, to your friends, and to anyone left who's still speaking to me. We lied to everyone for so long. Who knows? It might not've got so bad if we'd been truthful about it from the start."

The automatic doors swish open into the Princeton Plainsboro lobby. Several people look up as House objects loudly:

"Gawd. We don't need a babysitter. We definitely don't need half a dozen!"

From the look on Nurse Brenda Previn's face, she doesn't agree with him. The blonde receptionist beside her glances from him to the glass doors of Cuddy's office, where she's reaming someone out on the phone. Since it's usually him, by lunchtime the rumours will be circulating that he and boobalicious boss-woman are sleeping together. That might come in handy.

"House, we practically need separate cells and a whip-wielding keeper," Wilson retorts flatly.

He grins, sees Cuddy look up, and veers swiftly across the lobby toward the elevators.

"Kinky. Did you keep that jumpsuit?"

Wilson splutters, there's a hasty clunk and a clatter of keys. House laughs at the hurried sounds of mopping.

"Sorry, did that need a spit or swallow warning? 'Cause as I recall you never had a problem—"

"House!" Wilson yelps, still rattling around drying out his computer from its impromptu coffee shower. "Where _are_ you?"

"Outside the clinic. What?" he adds innocently, as Wilson makes a strangled noise of protest. "You did _say _full disclosure."

There's a momentary hiatus. The mopping has stopped while Wilson tries to decide whether to be irritated or entertained. House's heart, which had been jogging easily along, quickens to a canter. It steadies at a muffled guffaw.

"Christ." Wilson's voice sounds like it's coming through his fingers. He's probably buried his face in his hand and House guesses from the nasal quality that he's pinching the bridge of his nose. "I am _so_ glad I don't work there anymore."

The words are out of House's mouth before the thought is half completed.

"You know, you've probably got a free pass to come back."

Huh. A week ago the idea would have turned his blood to liquid nitrogen. Apparently that vital fluid is still all trapped and keeping toasty in the southern hemisphere. He adds in surprised distraction:

"Most of the staff thinks that _I_ chased _you_ off anyway."

He can imagine the stunned expression that lurches onto Wilson's face.

"How did you explain—?"

"I didn't."

House shrugs, more for his own benefit than Wilson's. He'd claimed his last, and worst, injuries were from a hardcore fender bender. It had won the toss between that and an attempt to take flying lessons off the top of a building while stoned out of his gourd. He's pretty sure the second part had been assumed anyway. His admission to Mayfield as self-confessed addict and loony-toon saved Wilson's reputation, although his friend doesn't know it yet.

"Wha—?" Wilson sounds as though he's not sure he wants to know how that's possible.

House tells him anyway, his voice low and a dirty smirk on his face designed to keep everyone in the vicinity of a mind to cover their ears and _la_ loudly to avoid hearing anything he might be saying.

"I pulled in an outside team of temps to do the medical grunt work while I was laid up. Everyone figured the cops and the lawyers were all over me for a DUI offence and that you cut and run in despair. My team got to keep schtum or find new jobs. Where d'you think those ball gags came from?"

There's an uneasy pause.

"TMI," Wilson says, at last, without much humour in it.

He's quiet again, digesting the information overload. House finds himself glancing at his handset, striving to read the pause. He hates not having body language to back up the tone of voice – or lack thereof.

Should he have told Wilson that? His friend hardly got off scot-free, what with the rehab and the charges on file, but his career was salvageable. Was House safer when Wilson was scared for his future and watching his ass like a son of a bitch? What would he do with the knowledge that the worst of what happened between them was, more or less, still their vicious secret?

"I'm not coming back," Wilson says at last, sending relief and disappointment tumbling headlong over one another down House's synapses. "I can't. Cuddy knew. She knew what was going on long before we were ready to admit it to ourselves or to each other. And she knew that we lied to her. She'd send a lynch mob here to Chicago and pay for the pitchforks out of her own pocket before she'd hire me back."

House bites on a sigh. That's true enough. The Queen of the Damned will set Wilson up for state execution before she'll let him find a job within a ten mile radius of House. Speaking of, another glance toward Cuddy's office finds her hanging up; her dark, predatory eyes swivel toward him. House hastens the last few steps across the lobby and punches the button for the elevator. It takes its sweet time coming. He hears the brisk sweep of two sets of glass doors and grimaces to himself. Sometimes, he wishes he didn't work here either.

"She should've kept her nose out of it," he mutters, although he knows she probably should've manned the cavalry sooner than she had. "What she doesn't know doesn't hurt her."

"It hurt _you_," Wilson challenges, stern and implacable; unconsciously, House tweaks his cap a little lower over his new bruise. "If we're going to be together _and_ skip that all important mutual trust thing, you _have_ to tell her. We were friends once, all of us. She may hate me now, but I trust _her_ not to stand back and let us screw this up again. _Tell her._ If you haven't just announced it over the loudspeaker system, that is."

For a split-second, it occurs to House that this might be reverse psychology. In certain ways, he's predictably contrary and Wilson knows it. He quashes the thought, but doesn't totally discard it; if it is, if Wilson _doesn't_ want him to tell her, it fits in with what House wants right now.

"Gee, thanks. Leave me to deal with the one-woman battalion."

"Sorry."

Wilson, to his credit, does sound contrite. He must figure he'll be in for an ear bashing not long after. Cuddy's on her way, so House speaks out of the corner of his mouth to keep the next part from her and every other peeping Tom and Thomasina in the place.

"Look, I'm not going to pull some flag waving, megaphone wielding announcement just yet." Not until he's figured out whether Wilson's for real on this one or if things are going to get even more interesting than he, House, had counted on. "Gotta save _some_ fun for your debut visit."

Over Wilson's muted groan, he adds: "Right now, I'm pretty sure the nurses all think I'm talking to—"

He raises his voice in greeting to the woman powering toward him.

"DR. CUDDY!" He drops his voice again to whisper quickly to Wilson: "Call me later – gotta go," and hits end call, sinking the phone into his pocket as the elevator and his boss arrive simultaneously.

He dives into the car on the pretext of a timely page. Snatching it off his belt, he reads:

_Use a megaphone if you must, just TELL HER! JW._

Isn't he laying it on just a little strong? _Isn't that what_ you _want?_ House adds cynically to himself and stabs at the close door button.

Cuddy is quicker than he is; she's in the car before the doors click together. Damn. So close and yet…so far. House sighs and rolls his eyes sidelong to meet her breasts.

"Good morning, Patti, Selma."

Cuddy crosses her arms over her scarlet scoop-necked blouse, does a better job of giving her boobs a boost than concealing them.

"That was a lot more flattering before you came out," she remarks. "Now it—"

"Still is. Plastic surgery for the aging Medusa's ego hasn't been invented yet."

"Self-help guides and pyramid schemes," Cuddy retorts, making a sterling effort to suppress both a smile and a scowl. "Speaking of help, _you're _going to need it."

She unfolds a sheet of paper she's holding loosely in her right hand.

"You billed a return flight to the hospital. Want to explain to me what you were doing in Chicago?"

"Hooker," House ripostes automatically.

Wilson's not-so-bright idea can damn well staying in its little shiny phantom light-bulb phase for now; if House has got to quit tying the man in psychological knots for his own benefit, he's not going to switch that for jumping through hoops for him again either. In any case, if he lets the she-dragon know where he went he's likely to end up back in the ICU, sedated into submission and tethered to the bed.

"Did you get a receipt?" Cuddy demands, glaring at him.

"Damn."

Cuddy swats him with the paper.

"You can't claim a personal trip on expenses. Not that I imagine you care, but since I have to, you're _going_ to. You don't travel, House. You _hate_ travelling. So. What were you doing in Chicago?"

House searches for a lie that might justify the excursion.

"Consult."

Cuddy's eyebrows vanish under her fringe. _Double damn._ Should've stuck with the hooker story; it was more believable. He tries to salvage it; this is too good a tall tale to waste.

"I do consults now," he points out. "This is the new me, remember? Version 2.0. Designed by Lisa Cuddy."

She lets herself be flattered. The sarcasm has been gratitude a time or two before now. He wouldn't've got over Wilson's departure without her support and she thinks she knows it. Of course, the question for the court now is: did he ever get over it at all?

Cuddy stuffs the bill into his jacket pocket and studies him consideringly. House tweaks his cap further down, just in case, disguises it with a rakish clothes-stripping, smirk that makes Cuddy roll her eyes.

"Next time, tell me first."

"Bitch, bitch." The doors ding open and House saunters extra-casually out into the corridor. "Do my job, you complain. Don't do my job, you complain."

Cuddy keeps pace with him. "D'you see me adding to your clinic hours?"

"No." But he can see his team already amassing through the glass doors into his DDX room, in full debate mode. "I'm guessing you've dumped a load of case files on my desk, though."

"Three cases is not a load."

House pauses by the door, argues: "Its lopsided."

_Bingo!_ Cuddy's first glance is down at her chest. Her next is a scowl right at him. House snickers. Her jaw drops.

"You're happy," she accuses.

"Nope," he assures her, breezily.

He doesn't know _what_ he is, beyond, well, _interested._ And Wilson's always been interesting. A rose by any other name? He shakes his head and shoves open the glass doors. Freakin' _roses?_ Wilson's right; this dating stuff _is_ bad for him.

He determinedly ignores Cuddy's soft, surprised:

"That's good, House; you're moving forward."

It makes him feel like he just found the thorn.

* * *

"Morning all."

Swinging into his DDX room whilst Cuddy departs down the corridor to harass some more mediocre degenerate, House casts a brief glance around at three-quarters of his team of lackeys, who have congregated around the big glass conference table in the centre of the goldfish bowl.

"Afternoon," Foreman counters, from one end of the table.

He doesn't bother to glance up at his boss or the clock; most of his attention is still bent on an open case file.

House eyes the square timepiece hung on the wall over Foreman's head. The numbers are all scrambled up in one corner, but top centre where the twelve should be are the words _whatever, I'm late anyways._ The hour hand skips up to the 'late' and he admits with a shrug:

"I stand corrected."

He slings his backpack down under the coat stand and shrugs out of his leather bike jacket, before gesturing to the heavily printed upon horde of dead tree heaped up across the table.

"What've we got?"

"_You_ got laid."

Chase, his longest serving fellow, quirks a glance at him over one shoulder, all floppy blond hair and congratulations grin. The wombat finishes making a fresh round of coffee and hands him one, holds his mug out to clink. House ignores it, tries to ignore Cameron's gaping mouth too, but she flaps it loudly.

"You're _seeing _someone?"

"Paying someone," Foreman suggests uninterestedly, turning pages.

"Wow and I thought slavery had gone out of fashion."

House snatches the board marker from beside Foreman's mug and limps over to the already annotated whiteboard, scanning the symptoms habitually.

"But," tapping the board with the pen, "look at that: I get a medical lackey and a scribe _and_, as an added bonus, he even thinks of my insults for me!"

He glances between the handsome Australian still doling out coffee and the yawning Victoria's Secret poster-girl setting out the case files for him.

"I'm going to trade you two in for blacker models."

Foreman doesn't even bother to sigh. He's resigned once, less over House's barbed wit than because, deep down, he thinks he's just like him. He's not. Deep down, Foreman's just a little fluffy kitten that rolled in some soot. He retracted his ego-fit when House got admitted half-dead. Good thing too. It saved House the hassle of sabotaging his interviews and wrecking Foreman's career to keep him from blabbing out Wilson to the entire medical world.

Snark quota fulfilled, House nonetheless acknowledges another thorny intrusion of discomfort at the momentary unease his flippant remark arouses when, at that moment, the glass door swings open to admit the fourth quarter of his team, Hadley.

Hired in at random from the never-ending influx of applications, in a fit of pique designed to frighten the others back into doing their jobs instead of nurse-maiding him after Wilson's GBH coupe de grace, Hadley has proved sufficiently apt at her profession to continue to make her colleagues uneasy about the safety of theirs nearly eleven months after she arrived. From the look on her face as she studies the fistful of results she's carrying, she isn't about to be making anyone's day today either.

"Evening," she deadpans, with a nod to House as the door snicks shut behind her. "Isn't there some sensational episode of a TV drama screening right now that you don't happen to have seen?"

House leans on the top of his board, amused. He can guess what predicates that remark.

Hadley passes the results to Cameron, who winces, before she hands them over to Foreman.

"What we have," Cameron ventures, picking up House's abandoned question, "is a problem."

Chase, who has read upside down in sync with Foreman, takes the file and pushes a file across the desk into House's sightline. It's the one that matches the symptoms on the whiteboard. House doesn't glance at it, doesn't smirk, doesn't let on that he knows what's coming.

"We reran all the blood-work this morning and the scans," Cameron continues, looping a few strands of long dark hair behind one delicate ear and adjusting her natty designer glasses. House adds her fidgeting to the list of symptoms, confirms his suspected diagnosis of new patient X. "We…uh…we need—"

"Oh for—" Foreman interrupts, impatient with her dithering, the situation, and the whole damn job that he can't now bring himself to leave. "We need…" He falters too. Sighs. "A really good bribe."

Hadley supplies, "An oncology consult."

"Aaaand," Chase finishes, extending his legs under the table and folding his arms behind his head with an air of careless resignation. "There's no one who'll consult with us."

House cranes his neck, crafts disingenuous blankness, disguising the sneaky urge to punch the air in victory. No matter how screwed up his and Wilson's relationship had got toward the crash-and-burn it ended in, Cuddy could've saved herself the cash and hassle hiring hordes of head-shrinkers and the buff squad of body-builders with batons instead of pompoms. A Berlin wall between his and Wilson's offices would've been better; they could've kept catapulting consults to one another over the top. Spare the pitchforks; spoil the diagnostician.

Of course, that might've been what she was afraid of. Spoil; spoil. Tom-ay-to; tom-ah-to.

"There's not no-one…" Cameron ventures, intruding on that line of lexical meandering with no certainty whatsoever. "Brown—"

"Threatened to retire." Foreman shakes his head.

"Schwartz—"

"Threatened to gut all of us and use our innards as suspenders." Chase shudders theatrically.

Schwartz is knocking on the wrong side of fifty, a waddling poster-woman for obesity and as friendly as a feral pitbull.

"Sandridge—"

"Off sick." Hadley this time, with a significant look at House. "He has this mysterious illness with relapses that always seem to coincide with Diagnostics needing a consult."

"Well, the new head then, Chen—"

"Is an idiot," House interjects, casting a disgusted look at the wall adjoining the next-door office.

He scrapes his chair back, snags the office phone off the ducklings' study table in the corner by the bookcases, and dials.

"Fortunately, I have someone I can blackmail."

The line connects and he strides unevenly towards his office, speaks cheerily into the receiver.

"Wonder Boy! Get on the wire or you're going to find yourself teaching my wood nymphs how to please a woman."

Four pairs of astonished eyes and an inelegant, "Oh _fuck,_" greet that announcement.

There's a scrambling sound as his unfortunate victim hastily excuses himself from what sounds like a meeting.

"What the—? How did you—? Have you worked your way through the _entire_ alphabet of pornos? And, for the record, that is _not_ me! I was _only_ part of the fire-dancing _Midsummer Night's Dream_ ritual at the start! It was a friend's college assignment! I didn't know when I signed the waiver that he was going to _become_ _a director _and, you know, extend and _sell_ it!"

The sputtering and the stammering negates all the pestering and paranoid rule-making of fifteen minutes ago. House's heart thrums with his own daring, but his laugh comes wicked and wilful.

"You in your office yet?"

"No. I'm leaving the damn country!"

A door opens; there are hurried footfalls and the chirrup of a laptop being awoken.

House lets the adjoining door between the DDX room and his office swing closed behind him, gimp-jogs across to his desk and drops into his chair. He boots up his own machine and punches keys to call up the patient's computerised records. He pauses long enough to snag a screen-cap out of the file he saved from skin flick he'd been watching when he made the first move three months ago. He sends it and his opening email is met with another exclamatory curse.

"You did _not_ interrupt a department meeting for this."

Chortling, House pings the newly updated scans and blood-work into the ether.

"Nah. Need a consult."

A chair creaks as his coerced colleague takes a seat.

"Oh gawd. What've you done to my old department?"

House pushes a toe against the floor and shoves off; the chair spins giddily on its swivel mechanism.

"Gossip later; differential now."

There's a click of keys and a thoughtful _hmm_. Recognising it, House stalls the chair and leans forward to scrutinize his monitor. He's doesn't see the team exchange glances: Cameron's lips part in an anxious 'o'; Foreman's countenance stills into lowering suspicion; Chase mouths uneasily:

"Wonder Boy?"

* * *

Call completed, cancer ruled out, House ambles back into his office to find that the attention of his most of his team is no longer concentrated upon the case. Only Hadley is still flicking through the uppermost file, with the tactful preoccupation of a self-conscious outsider suspecting she has inadvertently been caught up in something painful, personal and private. The other three have that annoying, high-school clique air about them, the one that Cuddy is sometimes party to, as though the aftermath of an agonising experience has some sort of allies-in-arms inducing properties to it. House doesn't stop short, determines not to let on that he has noticed it. His brain works rapidly. Did he just give himself and Wilson away? Did he _mean_ to? Does he still doubt his own ability to diagnose his oldest and best, if no longer only, friend either medically or psychologically? Does he doubt it so much that he's willing to play along with Wilson's theory that they should both sit down in front of the fiery pit of pissiness amidst the camp of their old colleagues, roast their testicles instead of s'mores and swap stories? To turn the man in to this pack of guardian jackals who'd probably prefer that he'd died on the table than have any medical excuse to spend time with House again? Does he _want_ Wilson chased back out of his life before they're back in too deep to find a way out?

Or, worse, does some pitiful part of him seek the wolves' acceptance?

Shoving all that as far away as it will go, House clomps over to the whiteboard and strikes both cancer and paraneoplastic syndrome off the differential list.

"No need for pieces of eight today. What else have you got?" he asks briskly, hooking his cane over the top of the white board and, after an itchy moment ferreting at his sweaty hair underneath it, plonks his cap on the corner too.

His clique of fellows freeze as though he's just pointed a rifle at them from the top of a clock tower.

"What's _that?_" Foreman cocks his chin in the approximate direction of House's face.

The stern set of his fellow's heavy features, the enquiring tone that borders on accusation, trigger a guilty reflex. House's hand flies upward. He checks it sharply, manages to touch his chin instead of his forehead.

"Designer stubble. Only works for people without an afro."

Foreman, who keeps his hair buzz cut to avoid just that, barely twitches. He keeps staring. Hard. Hadley eels out from between her chair and the desk, excusing herself as far as she can by retreating to the corner of the room with the coffee maker.

"He means," she observes as she passes, in the silken tones of one aware that the observation is unnecessary, "That shiner on your forehead."

"Doorknob?" Chase hazards, ladling on the cynicism.

House's bruise throbs. He sets his jaw, the old humiliation and resentment surging. If he were going to subscribe to Wilson's little show and tell scenario, this is the perfect prologue. It's also the absolute worst moment for any kind of confession. And he does _not_ feel that little thrill of perfidious pleasure and unease that comes with lying to his team…minions…loyal acquaintances…pet ducklings…lapdogs…friends…whatever.

"Baton twirling," he snaps, a beat too late to be convincing, and flicks his cane into the air to prove it.

Cameron ducks as it cartwheels over her head. House recaptures it; the wood slaps against the flesh of his palm.

"Therapist says I need a hobby. It's got girls in short skirts and I don't need to buy any props."

The two female members of his team exchange feminist glances. Chase chews on a smile. Foreman, alone, refuses to be deflected.

"It does _look_ like a cane mark," he allows. "If _someone_ swung it at your head."

House narrows his eyes, daring him to bring this up in front of Hadley.

Foreman eyeballs back, undaunted. "_Someone_ being a certain oncologist that you used to call Wonder Boy."

_Damn. Damn. Triple damn_. House squares stares with him, keeps his face blank.

"There _are _other caped crusaders fighting cancer across America."

"Any on your call list?"

"Hate to burst your bubble, but I wasn't the kid that got picked last for all the teams. If Princeton's crappy department won't consult with me, there're plenty of others who will."

"House," Cameron interrupts and, much to his amazement, she's gone so pale that a delicate smattering of freckles stand out on the bridge of her nose. "Please. Just promise us that you didn't get that from Wilson."

House curls his fingers into his palm, the impulse to reach for the Vicodin he no longer takes so strong that he's tempted to make an illicit trip to the pharmacy with a forged script. He misses being immune to the raw emotion he can see reflected with varying degree of forced suppression in his team's – damnit, _friends_ – eyes.

"No," he says, since technically he got it from an inert piece of wood attached to _The Solace_ and a stroppy gust of wind_._ "I didn't get this from Wilson."

"So, you're not seeing him again?" Chase makes it a question, knows better than to assume it, makes sure House knows it too.

House prefers omission and bending the truth to outright lying, if it can be done. But already this is too important not to pull out the big guns.

"I swear on my mother's grave—" he begins, exaggerating, rolling his eyes as though the whole fiasco is unnecessary.

Foreman interrupts, flatly: "Your mother isn't dead, House."

"Fine." House looks each of them in the eye in turn and, with a twinge of shame, sees them all fall for this classic feint. "Whatever. I swear on Cuddy's boobs: I am not seeing Wilson."

TBC…


	10. Chapter 10

**Part Nine A:**

"Wilson!"

The faux exuberance makes him chuckle, briefly pacifies the sweaty-palmed, airless, neurone-jangling, tension that's been besieging him ever since he pulled off the I-95 in his hired car and onto the exit ramp for Princeton. Even so he hovers on the _unwelcome_ mat that House likes to leave out in front of his door.

Wilson stood outside the main door for a while too, long enough for his tan suede jacket to become heavy and froth at the seams where the rain pounded down on him. He'd been fixated by a puddle building in the doorstep's groove worn by years of people's shoes and, he fears, House's ass. Once he stepped into it himself, he passed into some strange tear in the space-time continuum. He's two years ago, dithering in House's doorway, not knowing how to go back or how to go forward. His hair drips water onto his nose. He's cold, but it's not why he's shaking.

Blue eyes, clearer than the smog-tainted rain, seem to penetrate his clothes, his skin, and assess his soul. Wilson has just enough time to remind himself that it's an idiotic thing to think, before House extends the unopened beer in his left hand, swigs from the half-drunk one in his right and snatches Wilson's duffle bag, slinging it under the post table just inside the door.

"You going to stay out there all night?"

Wilson tries not to flinch; a ghost of guilt crosses House's face. Bad start. House retreats further inside: a silent invitation to advance. Wilson hesitates a few seconds longer before he breaches the threshold and accepts the beer held out to him. A faint line appears on House's weathered brow, confirms that it was a test. Determined not to fail, Wilson hefts the bottle in a vaguely apologetic gesture.

"I, uh, I can't drink this." He sets it down above his bag with a soft, glassy, clunk. "Tree hugger, remember?"

House shrugs, an air of apology in that too. The scent of hops is too strong to be confined to one open bottle. He isn't sober. He's pretending not to be scared.

_Softly,_ Wilson tries to tell himself and, uninvited, a childish rhyme singsongs through his head. _Softly, softly, catchee…Housey._ His adrenaline spikes and he wonders if any of the private investigators House sent to track him down ever felt this stalkerish, this primal.

_Christ. What wouldn't he give to drink that beer? _He eyes the brown glass glinting in the phosphorescent light from the TV, which is nattering away in the background. _It's just one… And he's always been a dopey drunk. _No. He promised. He forces himself to look away.

"C'mon," House says, to break the wary pause. "It's not like you don't know the place."

Nevertheless, he starts to lead the way into the lounge.

Wilson follows, slowly, so as not to overtake. House's movement is stilted, as though he's trying to disguise his limp. He's not carrying his cane. Unless Wilson has been cutting off his pain meds, he rarely ever does at home, though the heavy list to his step affirms, once again, the ineffectiveness of the OTCs he's taking in place of the narcotics he used to abuse. That, and the effectiveness of the alcohol he's using as a stopgap.

_Changed, House? _Wilson wonders gravely. _One poison for another? God. I shouldn't be here. One false move and we're back where we started: the edge of the volcano._

He starts as House's shin bumps the coffee table beside the sofa with a dull thud.

_Like that…_

The table rocks, draws his eye. He realises it's a replica, a not-quite exact copy of the one that shattered when he hurled House into it and over backwards in their last, fateful fight. The sword that wasn't there in Chicago is suddenly right over their heads. It's House's cane, hanging from the moulding over the archway from the entrance into lounge.

Wilson catches sight of it and stalls, unable to look at House or the dingy carpet beneath his feet. Over the familiar scents of piano wood polish, dust and books, he imagines the stale metallic taint of old blood. He finds he can't bring himself to cross a chalk outline that isn't there, some new fantastical boundary between now and then. This room, with its battered leather couch, instruments and hearth, the heart of House's home, is no longer a place that he belongs.

He stops short, gives stammering voice to the thought that has pursued him from his nice, fresh, new start in Chicago to their old, battered haunt:

"I, uh, I s-should go."

House looks over his shoulder and says a single word:

"Don't."

Wilson heart rams his sternum so hard he thinks his chest will crack. He's lost count of how many times House has done that. Done that with blood on his lips and pudgy flesh blackening around one slatted eye. Done that with the sag of stiffly set shoulders, a suppressed and silent sigh. Done that and waited for Wilson to exhale his own relief, knowing that House won't leave or let him leave. His muscles flicker with the automatic urge to go up behind him, grip his biceps and hook his chin over House's shoulder, to mutter an apology in his ear.

His vision fills with spots, blurs like the rain on the windows, and his ears ring. _What now? What should he apologise for? Staying here like a fool? Or going?_ The panicky tunnelling of his vision locks on House, front and centre. He's turned, crossed the room, stands facing Wilson less than a foot away. The beer bottle is set aside on the piano and his right hand snakes its fingers through Wilson's left, squeezes.

"Don't," he repeats.

Wilson is frozen to the spot, in a rush too hot instead of too cold, and claustrophobic.

House's left hand comes up, captures Wilson's jaw in the cup of a palm, stops him shaking his head. A callused thumb skims the faint trace of his five o clock shadow.

"Don't," he says again, the word puffing against Wilson's chin.

Wilson goes cold again; instinctively, he sidles closer.

House's lips are damp, malt-flavoured, and pushy. He closes his mouth around Wilson's, swallows his surprised breath. His blue eyes blur at this proximity. Wilson tastes the quick flick of a smile before House's eyes slide closed and his tongue sweeps inside, swipes his reservations.

"Don't," House whispers, as Wilson's arms come up to wrap around him.

Despite his sopping clothes and sodden hair, House doesn't seem to mind holding him close. Wilson grips two fistfuls of House's tatty blue shirt, one between his scapula, one at his collar, and kisses him back.

"Okay," he murmurs. "Okay."

_Softly, softly, catchee Wilson._

_

* * *

_

House's mouth circles Wilson's, stubble scuffing five o' clock shadow. He snatches kisses, circles, snatches, circles, snatches again, deeper. An opportunist tongue sneaks between Wilson's lips. The soft-rough dichotomy of mouth-to-mouth need overwhelms his wisdom and his inhibitions. He's seduced by every tingling touch, every playful assertion and rebellious submission. He kisses back, all clasping fingers in silver hair, and commands in turn, tracing the fine moist outline of House's lips tantalisingly with his tongue. He kisses too, long and lingering, then seeks the wet plush lining inside House's lower lip, presses inside and tickles his tongue tip over the roof of House's mouth.

House arches against him, a long lithe slam of hard bodies and serpentine arms. Goosebumps spring from skin to skin and two hearts reverberate, chest to chest. Their kisses grow deep and hungry. Electricity leaps from one to the other and back again. The sparks shine in House's eyes, whoosh through Wilson's nerves.

Their mouths meet again, wet and insistent. Hands peregrinate inside drenched clothes, rend House's shirt half off one shoulder. A garment trail marks their three-legged slow-dance down the corridor to the bedroom.

House elbows his door open, ignores the clatter of weird bits of pyramid and other foreign knick-knacks jolted off his dresser. Tripping on a maze of unwashed clothes, treading out of shoes, they navigate the next few feet of carpet and hit the bed together, all of a tangle. Then it's heat and hands and House and—

"Wait."

Wilson's voice comes strained. Sweat slicks his upper lip, tastes salty on his tongue.

"What?" House growls, fumbling with his belt.

The jangle of the buckle dries out Wilson's mouth, all but sticks the words in his throat. He clasps his hand around the slim strands of metal, snatches the long brown leather frond free of its denim loops and flings it far away. Knelt between House's legs, Wilson eases back onto his haunches, fusses with his own belt.

"Switch places."

House frowns doubtfully; his leg resents most positions, some quicker than others. Wariness filters into his eyes, grim wonderings about Wilson's own sexploits in their interval of separation. Wilson tosses his own belt and opens his zip. He takes a deep breath.

"I want to—I want _you_ to—" He breaks off and backs off the bed for a moment to climb out of his beige suit pants; then wavers by the edge of the mattress, tries again decidedly: "I want to break _all_ of our old patterns."

"Really?" House is dismissive. "I want you to fuck me."

Wilson swallows hard, cock rearing to bump his belly, brain the dithering butterflies there. A soft _uh_ escapes him at the thought of pushing _in_ deep and possessive, of the clench of House's body claiming him. He breathes out steadily through his nose, shivers in a swirl of nervousness.

"No." He eases his white briefs down, baring himself in every possible way. "My turn."

House rises on his elbows, a dark appetite in his eyes. He waits for Wilson to crawl over to him on the thick black blanket covering the bed, kneel between his legs again. Then he sits in one fluid motion, seizes Wilson's hips, jerks his groin against his chest and runs both hands over the bare curves of Wilson's buttocks. His fingers slip in between them. Wilson shudders and stiffens. His heartbeat thunders in his ears. He's unaware that his fists clench at his sides.

House's tongue circles his navel, wet and slippery, round and round and _in_, thrusting, pushing. A sharp _hoh_ jerks from Wilson's throat and he grabs House by the shoulders, fingers biting hard enough to leave ten circular bruises.

"No," House mumbles against his skin.

Wilson's eyes snap open, stare confusedly down at the tangled salt-and-pepper curls, the curved neck. House's shoulders are faintly dappled where bits have tanned and burned over the years. Blue eyes roll to meet his, clear and penetrating, before House arches up the length of his body and urges Wilson over onto his back.

Balancing awkwardly on his knees, House shucks off his blue jeans and boxers together, slings them onto the floor and worms between Wilson's legs. His thick hard cock sinks into the groove of Wilson's ass. Wilson throws his head back. The edge of the mattress nuzzles at his nape and blood rushes dizzyingly to his brain. He grits his teeth as House's erection shunts between his cheeks. His stomach muscles contort painfully.

House's lips drag a wet trail up his pounding carotid, mouths along his jaw.

"No," he rumbles again.

His hips writhe, drive the hot leaking length of him back and forth along Wilson's crack. Wilson's breath falls out in heaving pants. His hands leave spasming red prints down House's biceps, lock around his elbows. His back is moulded flat to the mattress. The sheet is plastered to his sweating skin.

"Much as I would love to fuck you," House rasps, punctuating it with steady, driving cants of his hips. "You've never wanted that."

He stills. His fingers comb through Wilson's damp hair, staticky where it has been chafed against the fleece blanket. He sweeps it gently back off Wilson's flushed face. Wilson opens his eyes slowly, surprised. House half-smiles at him, lifts his hips away, giving Wilson room to breathe again.

"It's okay," House says quietly, thumbing the sweat of Wilson's forehead. "This isn't what it takes to get me back."

All at once it doesn't seem so bad, this act that he's been steeling himself for. House seems to catch a glimpse of it in his eyes, the relaxing of his features. He leans down, kisses Wilson, warm and slow and reassuring.

"Another time, if you like," he concedes.

Wilson cradles the back of House's head in both hands, leans their brows together and inhales slowly, feeling their breathing synchronise.

"I don't want to…" He curls one hand over House's thoracic curve, follows the knobbles of his spine downward to skim the tip of his sacral region, trying to convey through touch what he's rarely rough-tongued enough to say. "I do. God,_ I want you_. Want to be inside you. But after…"

Their eyes catch on a recollection, tear uncomfortably away. Anger and sadness shift across House's face. He eases back on his knees and quickly finds a grin.

"Scoot your legs around then," he says cockily, folding backwards against the pillows and beckoning with indolent anticipation.

He spreads his, grasps Wilson's ankle when Wilson finds the pillow with both feet, and rubs his bristly chin up the inside of Wilson's thigh. Wilson groans deep in his throat and nips at the curve of House's hip.

"Race you," House challenges and swallows Wilson whole.

* * *

Sticky and sated in the afterglow, they stay lying top to toe, hands idly exploring the lax expanses of each other's muscles and damp skin. Rubbing his thumb up and down the shallow sensitive gully between House's hip and thigh, toying with a few thick silvery curls of hair near his groin, Wilson remarks without much seriousness behind it:

"For two people with multiple degrees between us, that was colossally stupid."

"That," House contradicts, "Was colossally _hot._"

Wilson grins and doesn't challenge it; neither of them are wrong.

"We can't just do this," he says instead, sobriety starting to seep through the lingering haze of sheer gorgeous sensation. "A joint confession of culpability and a roll between the sheets doesn't fix things between us."

House's eyes do a sweep of the ceiling, then consider him askance.

"Apologise, explain, kiss and make up." He ticks the points off on his fingers. "Check, check, check. Whaddya want? A certificate from the Cliff Notes Crash Course in Relationship Rehab, with a year's free supply of Trojans and KY?"

"No." Wilson tries not to get frustrated, without much success. "But we can't just do this and pretend everything's all better. It's a band-aid over a bullet hole."

House groans, doubtless as much at the mediocre metaphor as the meaning of it.

"We can't live according to a twelve-step programme either. There isn't _a way_ to do this."

There's a sarcastic inflection on _a way_, but as Wilson turns the phrase over in his head he hears it without. _There isn't a way to do this._

"We can't go on as we are," he says, reluctant and careful, aware once more of how much simpler it would be to end this all in goodbye.

House cuts him off with a loud, dramatic sigh.

"Y'know, you suck at pillow talk. Fine. What's the word from Chicago's finest head shrinker?"

Wilson chews his cheek, tries not to give too much away. His shrink had been in favour of the apology, of seeking forgiveness from one another. He'd also very strongly suggested Wilson consider whether attempting a reconciliation was in any way progressive or healthy. An anvil dropped out of the sky would have been subtler.

Wilson paraphrases, distorts, omits:

"He recommended having ground rules. And making plans. Baby steps. Take it slow."

"Any slower and we'll grind to a stop," House protests. His eyes search Wilson's, narrow. "Is that what you want?"

It should be. Shouldn't it? If not what he wants, what he _must_—Hell with it. Always doing what he's told has screwed his life up six ways to Sunday. He's going to try _not_ doing what he's told now.

Even so, he treads carefully: "Do you?"

House's lips tighten, as he resists being put on the spot. There's a horrible, dangling moment where Wilson realises it might end here because they're each too stubborn, too damaged, to own up to wanting – _needing_ – anything from one another.

He's had moments like this with his wives and he's never had a problem breaking the silence. He's been too tired, too resentful, too sick of trying, to do anything but parrot pat lines of apology that he can only remember because it seems like the right thing to say. A few words he can pat himself on the back for saying later, use to justify himself, to prove that he tried to fight for a relationship that – if he had – would never have reached the moment of reckoning in the first place. Now, when it matters, when he needs to say what he honestly feels, he hardly knows what that is. How can he keep safe a relationship that always seems to _want_ to break?

He's shaking his head, he realises, before he's reached a conclusion. The words come in a rush, in a voice that hardly sounds like his own.

"Because no, it's not what I want. Knowing you were going to call me, or the police or my landlord, knowing you were around, and still _you_ – after my operation – it stopped me giving up. On my groups. On my therapy. On myself."

He stares at the pale magnolia ceiling, eyes wide; he doesn't dare look at the figure lying as if paralysed beside him.

"I learned to change because I needed to, House. But…"

He sighs, recognising that sex _does_ short out the brain. That this is why they should've stuck to talking until things were more secure between them. That he's going to have to try to think and communicate through the afterglow.

He speaks cautiously, faltering as the afterglow recedes, leaves him stranded in a haunted reality.

"Look, I—I can't – there's not enough therapy in the world to make me able to – to make me even pretend that – that I did it just for me. You know I've never been good at…at putting myself first. I'd be lying if said I didn't do it because of you too. Because of us."

He falls silent to the tumbling of rain on the glass. It patters like drummed fingers, blats like House's lacrosse ball being tossed against the wall while he thinks. The pause is as wriggly as the watery patterns squirming their way down the panes on either side of the headboard.

House hacks and hawks, clears his throat loudly and abruptly.

"We've done the rules," he says, enough emphasis on the _we_ that Wilson knows he was heard, even if House too has had to search for words and can't even come up with a joke. "Done the plans. Done three months baby stepping up and down the I-95. What did you want to do? Find a make-out spot and grope like horny teenagers for a while? Write up a lovers' contract: one to ten ways not to rearrange each other's faces? Sign it in blood?"

"I—"

House rolls over onto his belly and frowns over his shoulder at Wilson, visibly uncomfortable with the turn of the conversation and ratty about it.

"If I hadn't just had proof to the contrary, I'd be asking if you got a sex change as well when you had that tumour removed. Do we really need to talk about this – again?"

Wilson stiffens, feeling bare and baited. The voice he knows better is back, scathing, chiding. _You just going to take that, you little girl? Stand up for yourself. Be a man_!

He sets his teeth, reminds himself that being a man means being man enough to keep calm, to stand up without squaring up.

"_Don't_ shut me down," he says, sharper than he means to.

He crawls around until he's lying beside House, mostly in the wet spot, clasps his hands tightly over his belly and settles his head on the pillow so that he can look up into House's face.

"We _made_ a contract – a pact, whatever – with each other, House, out on Lake Michigan last week. We promised we'd keep making changes ourselves and in our relationship so that we don't end up hurting each other again. But I've been here for just over two hours and we've fallen straight into our old habits, sex and shut the hell up. That's not what we agreed."

House stifles a yawn. "It's eleven twenty p.m. on Friday and you caught a late flight. What did you want to do, go out for dinner?"

Wilson shrugs, nods. "I think we should've done."

House casts him an impish look. "Candlelight? Red roses? You in a tux—"

Wilson elbows him, hard enough to leave House breathless, biting on a laugh.

"I'd settle for a hotdog and cotton candy at the hockey stadium." He hesitates, figures he can handle the mockery. "But yeah, I'd like to."

House studies the wood grain on the headboard with unnecessary concentration. His voice comes utterly neutral.

"Tomorrow night okay?"

It takes Wilson a moment to catch up. He turns his head to stare at House, but the man is studiously not looking at him.

"I made reservations for eight," House continues, rubbing his chin. "There's a jazz festival in the park from two. Figured we could eat after."

"Oh." Wilson closes his gaping jaw, a hopeful warmth suffusing him at the realisation that House _has_ listened, that he _has_ made some changes, after all. "Okay then. Sounds good."

"Great," House yawns. He flops down, squashes his face into Wilson's clavicle, slings an arm across his chest and firmly closes his eyes. "Go to sleep."

Wilson brushes a kiss over his hair, tips his head to rest his jaw against House's skull.

"Night, House."

"G'night, John Boy."

TBC…


	11. Chapter 11

**Part Nine B:**

"What was that?"

Wilson startles awake from a strange fantastical dream where a youngish House – early thirties, the age he'd been when Wilson first met him – was beckoning to him from the pages of a porno mag. Wilson, little more than thirteen, was exploring himself through the thin fabric of his striped cotton pyjamas on the night of his _bar mitzvah_ and a budding erection nuzzles the sheets_._ The click of a lock and the sound of footfalls set his heart racing. He scrambles to shove the magazine out of sight under his mattress, gather the bedcovers over his groin. The dream breaks in a sweaty dishevelled struggle to extricate himself from House's arms and a panicky expectation of finding his father at his most severe standing silently in the doorway.

Jolting upright, the patchwork blanket his mother had knitted and the matte red bedcovers of Wilson's adolescence fade into House's charcoal brushed cotton ones and a tousled black blanket. In place of his posters and family pictures on the oak dresser are odd bits of rock and excavated relics from various countries that could be secreted away in pockets to escape the mass clear-outs whenever House's military family moved base. An untidy labyrinth of splayed jeans, concertinaed t-shirts, mismatched socks and twisted shirts sprawls across a carpet that hasn't seen a vacuum in months. A heap of medical journals has subsided in the night, sliding in a silent avalanche to leave a slithery flood of glossy pages near the door. It hasn't opened, but Wilson can still hear footsteps prowling about beyond it.

"House."

He keeps his voice to a whisper, shakes the nearest shoulder. House makes a noise in his throat that Wilson associates with cows, despite having only encountered them in burgers.

"Hrrrnngh."

House buries his face deeper into the pillow. Despite his absence between one and six a.m. perambulating restlessly and cursing his leg, eventually to return with cold feet and bourbon on his breath, House refuses to be woken again at the more conscionable hour of ten. Wilson shakes harder.

"House, wake up! Someone's in the apartment."

House snuffs and grunts, as if he doesn't care. Wilson's on the brink of going to investigate solo when the words finally get the better of House's sleepy indifference and he raises his head, flushed and groggy.

"Huh?"

He too registers the solid clump of feet investigating the lounge and kitchen.

"What the—?"

Wilson shrugs, shakes his head.

"Who has a key to your door?"

"No one." House scrubs a hand over his face, surfaces properly. "There's one on the ledge."

Wilson gawks at the matter of fact tone. "Nice security."

An unhelpful thought sneaks through the gathering throng of questions and he adds:

"You chased me out of every city I tried to settle in, fabricated stories of my turning up here to harass you so that my landlords and employers would kick me out, but you don't even keep your door _secure_?"

House doesn't even try to look abashed.

"Your old key should still fit."

Wilson spares a heartbeat to wonder if he missed several ploys to get him to come back long before the drop-calls began.

"Jesus, House. I didn't beat the gall out of you, did I?"

House shrugs. "It wasn't bravery. It was laziness."

Wilson studies him, shakes his head and banishes his hopeful speculation in favour of the more likely, more logical, cause.

"No, it wasn't," he guesses. "You gave up. You figured if I came back this time, then there was nothing you could do to stop me." He pales, concern growing the sharp fangs and hackles of distrust. "Is that why I'm here?"

"_No._"

He can't accept that. He broke House, after all. For a moment, he forgets about the intruder.

"I have to go."

"_No!_ Wilson – _damnit_ – stop making assumptions!"

House rolls over and seizes him, secures his wrists against the pillow with hands. His weight is on his left leg and hip, his right hoisted up to pin Wilson's legs in a succinct, but easily breakable, gesture. It brings their groins into alignment, both half-awake and warmly curious about it. Smugness replaces the exasperated expression on House's face and he murmurs in what he thinks is a seductive manner:

"You really want to go?"

Wilson struggles to breathe through his nose. _Fuck you. _Fuck _you_. _Who do you think you are? Get off me!_ The anger is quick and intense, as always. But it has a language now, a heat to it that can be cooled and answered. He shuts his eyes to stop House's features morphing into the blocky, jowly plains of another once handsome hot-head whose fist Wilson remembers even better than his face.

He shuts the anger down too, before he meets one expectation with another and throws House off, lashes out at him for this stupid, egotistical, testing, _terrifying_, little power play. _It's not him. It's House. He's okay…if you are._ His stomach hitches. He's _not_ okay. Fear rears up as anger falls – and all of a sudden House's thumbs are rubbing over and over his pulse points. Wilson feels through his own thin skin and House's calluses the anxious mutual rush of their blood.

House's fingers loosen off and, instead of those dark and dangerous eyes that Wilson remembers every time he looks in the mirror, he's transfixed by bright piercing blue ones. They flicker, momentarily, almost duck from his habitually, sparing him the intensity and the accusation he always saw there, especially when they were swollen, black and bruised. They never saw _why_, never looked anywhere but inward; the place Wilson could never bring himself to scrutinise. The flicker rights itself and House studies him, sees him…trusts him?

Wilson almost smiles. He'd like that. One day. But it's not today. House must know who is out there, know one shout would bring them running.

Wilson's stomach clenches again. Is this a set-up? What if the restraining order _hasn't_ been lifted? He'll do jail-time now, for this, for certain.

He searches for the anger, fruitlessly. Tastes panic on his tongue, flat and metallic.

Jail would break him.

Which he probably deserves.

He struggles a little and House lets off immediately. A flash of fear, quickly covered, and fingers retreat to his sternum, play lightly there, reassuring. Wilson's stupid heart slows before it knows what's what. Apparently, he trusts House a little now too.

House flattens his palm over Wilson's left pectoral, half checking the beat below, half holding him in place. His head cocks as the footsteps come closer, progress up the corridor. With a roll of his eyes that confirms he knows who is out there, he calls out:

"If you're stealing stuff, take the stereo. Leave me the TV."

An all too familiar mezzo-soprano carols back: "House, it's us."

"Shit!"

House's long-suffering look is gone in a wash of stark horror. _Cuddy_. Electrified, they break apart from one another. Since it's his first impulse, Wilson makes no attempt to protest when House stuffs him under the bedcovers and drags the whole heap up over both their heads. Lurking in a den of quilts and pillows, like naughty children in a bedding fort, Wilson whispers:

"Not who you were expecting?"

House wangles an arm out of their cocoon, flails around on the floor for their boxers. As a pair of pale briefs are shoved into his hands and he pulls them on in the crepuscular dimness, Wilson hopes like hell that they're his own and not one of the crusty discarded pairs House has probably worn inside out and right way around in lengthy efforts to forestall doing the laundry.

"Are you kidding?" House dives around under the covers, hisses through his teeth as his bad leg objects to the gymnastics of making himself decent. "I thought it was Cameron and Chase. They make a habit of popping around. It's…annoying."

The scrambling and the swearing suddenly make sense. House's fellows he can browbeat into submission. Cuddy he cannot. She keeps pace with every one of his canny capers, contorts his head games into some kind of competitive psychological dance, all masks, metaphorical spears, and silently tattooed drum-skins. There's a fire in her akin to Wilson's rage and House's recklessness and, if set alight without warning, she's liable to roast them both alive. Shit, indeed.

Wilson swats his way out of their juvenile cocoon, rumpled and aghast.

"You didn't tell her, did you?"

House sits up, shoves the covers aside. They face off from either side of the mussed bed sheets, bickering in boxers and in whispers.

"Daaaad. I tell mommy _everything_."

The parental allusions make Wilson twitch. He smears an involuntary snarl from his face with his palm and gesticulates sharply, chastising the nearby air with an open-handed slap.

"_House!_ Full disclosure, remember? That was the _key_ to this."

"No," House springs from his perch on the bed and swivels on his good leg, wielding a warning forefinger. "The key is _you __**not hitting**__ me. _The chitchat was supposed to be a safeguard. It shouldn't be necessary."

Wilson's hand drops, his aggrieved dismay deflated by the realisation that this has been another of House's tests. He gulps as he recognises the tangled conundrum of House's faith and his arrogance and his willingness to stick his neck out in the names of science and friendship.

For a few seconds Wilson teeters. He's torn between wanting to shake House until his damn infernal self-sacrificial streak falls out of his stupid head and stumbling back a few steps, daunted by his twin elements of indomitable curiosity and loyalty.

It's several more seconds before Wilson realises that he's simply moving his lips speechlessly, in the helpless manner he remembers from more or less every day of his relationship with House. He can't decide if he wants to thump the wall in frustration or crawl back into the bedding fort and wave a pair of white boxers in the hope of a peace treaty. His half-raised hand drops as a pent-up breath whooshes from his lungs.

"I take back the bravery thing," he sputters, at last. "You're an idiot!"

There's a volley of knocks on the door before House can reply. His ego flattens as if from machine gun fire. Eyes wide and nostrils flaring, he flaps a frantic hand at Wilson and at the covers.

"Shut up and hide!"

The wood trembles under more demanding percussion. House's lips move in muttered curses while Wilson stands stupidly, half-naked and sticky and directly in line with the door. Determined not to cower in the closet – the metaphor alone is too embarrassing – he resolves to face the music. He'd be lying, though, if he'd rather it weren't Strauss's revenge tragedy _Salome_ than his former friend and boss about to become hell-bent on high-pitched retribution.

Shooting him a reciprocal _idiot_ look over one shoulder, House hobbles to the door and cracks it, blocking the opening with his body.

"I've got company," he growls, thrusting his head into the gap with what sounds like a ferocious glower in place.

"We don't care about the hooker, House," another female voice sings out. Cameron.

A masculine snort issues from a familiar throat and Wilson grimaces, unseen. Foreman. This isn't just Cuddy gate-crashing and likely to murder him with a Prada stiletto. She's brought the whole flock of ducklings to peck him to death.

As if on cue, Chase adds:

"Or the boyfriend, whoever he is…"

Wilson can't see House's face, but from the set of his shoulders he'd wager it's plastered in a sneer of mock-relief.

"If you wanna film it, you gotta pay for the website and the wages."

Wilson pulls a face at his back, biting his tongue to stop himself adding his own dry comment to _that_ insinuation. It's doubtless as much a dig at his inability to keep his trousers zipped as it is at House's syphilis-courting investments and at Cuddy's penchant for wearing date clothes to work. The man's snark should come with a triple x rating.

"House," Cuddy counters in her cultivated through the teeth tone. "I will pay for backstage _season_ tickets to a porn studio of your choice – as long as you _promise_ me that you aren't back together with—"

That's it. Wilson can't let her bankrupt herself. House is far too accomplished a liar. He seizes his t-shirt before she's halfway through that ill-planned quip and joins House at the door. He sets his grip above House's on the jamb and levers it firmly wide open. Cuddy's jaw clicks closed and for an instant Wilson is sure that she is going to spit on him.

* * *

In the movies, there's always a few seconds hiatus, a pause before a sudden surge of action. In this reality, there's no such thing. Foreman bunts Cuddy aside and seizes Wilson's arm, jerks him past House and into the corridor. Chase's hand clamps around his other arm as he stumbles. Where last night there was an uncoordinated waltz down the corridor, this morning brings a bone-bruising frog-march. The carpet burns the balls of Wilson's feet. The voice fires up at once.

_You going to stand for this?_

He catches a glimpse of Cameron as he's lugged past her. Her pretty face is pinched pale with hatred. Behind him, House is swearing, hop-stepping, his leg stiff and cramping at the sudden lurch from sleep to exertion.

_Get your fists up, boy! There's no-one waiting on a gauntlet, dawn and pistols here! Defend yourself! You don't deserve this – don't stand for it!_

Wilson stops dead in the doorway to the lounge, jolts House's fellows off-guard. There's an agonised _oof_ and Chase staggers, clutches his ribs, and tumbles into the arm of a nearby wingchair. Foreman turns on Wilson, vestiges of his car-stealing gangland youth barging through the front of cool composed professionalism he cultivates. An uncontrollable burst of adrenaline and fear-impelled fury tear through Wilson. He poises, ready to—

House's cane whistles as it's swung. Withdrawn from Chase's side, it cracks down across Foreman's knuckles. Foreman yells and recoils. The solid shaft skims the air so near to Wilson's face that he shies, snatches it on its backwards arc. House lets go and leaps back. He slams into the doorframe with the sickening bang of bone on painted wood.

Someone gasps. Brown eyes snap to blue. Shock and shame flash back and forth between them. Wilson colours; House has paled. Wilson's rage trickles disgracefully away. He raises his hands in tactic surrender. Then there's nothing but their panting, slowly synchronising. In the disorientating tunnel vision induced by the fight/flight instinct, it seems that there is now a moment of fright: stillness, suspense. It's an illusion. Moving as if commanded by strings, Wilson carefully holds House's cane out to him.

House all but snatches it. He shoves away from the doorframe, catches Foreman at cane-point to stall a renewed charge toward Wilson. Chase is on one knee, a winded heap festooning the arm of the wingchair. He's glaring but waiting, blue-grey eyes intense and curious. Wilson is surprised to sense an ally there, then wonders why he should be. For all Chase's often feigned bravado he is the most like his boss, astute and sensitive and daring; he understands the concept of second chances. Whilst House backs Foreman steadily toward the sofa, Wilson steps forward and holds out a hand.

Chase appraises him for a heartbeat, notes his unbloodied knuckles, pillow-creased cheek, the sticky mess Wilson can _smell_ in his hair. A cool, slightly rain-damped hand grasps his and he hauls Chase to his feet. They stand together, not quite shoulder-to-shoulder, aware of Cameron and Cuddy coming up to flank them, trap Wilson in a half-circle of their bodies.

Foreman smacks House's cane off his sternum. He glowers at his boss with his calves pressed up against the edge of the sofa. Choosing to ignore his predicament, he stabs an accusing forefinger toward Wilson.

"What the hell is _he_ doing here?"

"Me," House snaps, making Wilson wince.

Foreman's skin flushes darker than ever with disgusted fury.

"Doing _what_ to you?" he parries, eyes ticking toward the fading bruise beneath House's disarranged hair.

House's lip curls at the insinuation. His voice could chip steel.

"You're a bit black to play the white-knight, don'tcha think? Get out, Foreman. This is none of your—"

"The hell is this not my business—" Foreman snarls. Hands clamped at his sides, he manages to get up in House's face without stepping into his personal space.

House rocks on the balls of his feet and for a split second Wilson is sure that he's going to serve Foreman a knuckle sandwich. The loathing that House should long ago have directed at Wilson is focused intently upon his fellow. A blazing flush has burnt up his cheeks, the old shame of having needed help, of being reminded of it, knocks years off him. His seething passion makes him tower. Every muscle thrums with it, coiled, ready to take on all comers. His jaw juts, his chin is high: pure arrogance and denial. His unconquerable ego is bent against the idea that Foreman might be right, that what he and Wilson are doing here again might be wrong.

A calm, unthreatening voice filters into Wilson's head, his shrink's, strangely paraphrasing a favourite line of his father's.

_Are you going to step up or not?_

"House."

Wilson walks forward. He lays a hand on House's brittle shoulder, tries not to mind the sharp twitch of startled skin. He licks dry lips and glances first at Foreman, then over his shoulder at the other three. "This _is_ their business."

He speaks to Foreman again, clearly, honestly:

"I made it your business when I started beating up your boss every week."

Foreman holds his stare, square and steady and scathing. Wilson can't look down, can't look away, can't yield; the second he does his ears will ring and his eyes fill with flashing stars and he'll have a headache for a week. He knows better. He's been taught better. His father will hit him so hard—

This isn't his father either. _This __**isn't**__ his father._ Wrong name, wrong race, wrong generation. Wrong location too. There was never anyone standing between them, where House is now, irresistible, immovable, shielding. Wilson inhales slowly, tastes bile and dread in the back of his throat. His heart beats too fast as he acting on instinct instead of conditioning. He holds Foreman's stare for a few more seconds, meaningfully, then lets his attention arc slowly around to engage first with Chase, Cameron, and then, at last, Cuddy.

His former boss greets him with that same set-jawed, tilted chin challenge that House wears. The coldness in her eyes burns him to the core; she trusts him a lot less far than she would, given the chance, like to throw him. But, as he dares drop his eyes from hers, only to glance up again, her head cocks fractionally to one side, as though she's listening for a change that she can only sense. She watches him acutely for a few more seconds, searching for tells, for hints that he is acting, manipulating. Wilson does his best to avoid indicating any such thing. Finally, she exhales heavily through flared nostrils.

"Well then," she says neutrally, smoothing her flared black jersey skirt underneath her and taking a seat in the nearest chair. "Let's talk business."

House breaks off his staring competition with Foreman to swivel around with a jerk.

"What the hell—?"

Wilson puts a hand out, touches his wrist to hush him. Fresh suspicion sparks in Cuddy's unblinking eyes. Wilson nods to her, slow and careful, ignores House's interruption.

"Okay," he agrees. "I'll make some coffee."


	12. Chapter 12

**Part Ten**:

_Coffee?_ Coffee? _Doesn't Wilson_ know _the only thing to drink after a set-to is_ beer?

House gawps after his partner until his tongue dries out enough to hold back a verbal exclamation and reminds him he's catching flies. He's in no mood to offer the monstrous regiment of women, wombat and golliwog invading his lounge anything other than a foot up their collective asses, so wasting a brew of any kind is off _his_ to-do list. But Wilson's got that Jewish mother air about him, which means breaking out the percolator and the baked goods and, hell, if bribery works House'll pass the plates around himself.

Even so, he angles for a quicker option. Whilst Cuddy sits, poised and poisonous, in the armchair, Foreman on the sofa all folded forearms and face like a closed fist, Chase, coiled and curious in the wingchair, Cameron, perched and skittishly stern on the arm of it, House keeps his feet and edges out of the circle. Loitering indecisively between his good friends and his former best friend, he says with feigned cheer:

"Anyone wanna play a game?"

Eight eyes swivel toward him; he takes their attention as an affirmative.

"Great. I vote Hide and Seek. I'll close my eyes, count to ten, and when I look around you won't be here. Ready?"

Cuddy reproaches him with a look. Beneath the severity she projects, he can see, as if beneath the surface of two dark oceans, the hull of long-wrecked hope, drowned trust, deeply anchored sorrow and, marooned in the fine lines around her eyes, an empathic understanding of his inability to let go of a man she cares about.

House yanks his gaze away from hers, refuses to acknowledge that he knows, in some indescribable way, that she too experienced every one of Wilson's blows.

"Fine," he snaps and veers away from her into the kitchen.

Amidst the black and white tiles, unvarnished pine table, and granite work surfaces, Wilson has found his duffle bag if not his equilibrium. He's hopping about hoisting clean jeans up his thighs, whilst the percolator bubbles on the countertop.

House longingly studies the sleek lines of runner's muscles that he was kissing just hours ago and wishes it _were_ hours ago. Not the shivering, stuttering, mistrustful moments imprisoned in a lounge full of stained carpet, wonky shelves, the torn bits of leather on the sofa and the bare spaces where broken lamps, shattered decanters, a crushed DVD player used to be. But the careless cocoon of sweaty sheets, sprawling limbs, and warm skin within a hand's easy reach.

Not for the first time, House muses at Wilson's uncanny ability to make him so scared he can taste unshed tears in his throat, smell the raw soil beneath the porch steps where his father used to lock him, feel the rising tide of ice and isolation sear his skin…and yet so safe that something deep and tight and agonising inside him that has nothing to do with his leg unclenches, that he can listen to his own heartbeat and not wish that it would hold still for a while or just stop, that he can smile and keep smiling, even – especially – if Wilson sees.

Stockholm syndrome, Cuddy once told him. God. Why won't she just go _home?_

As Wilson's thighs vanish from view and his zipper _hrrks_ up, House jerks a thumb at the mismatched cluster of mugs.

Sceptically, he asks: "You think this is going to work? Give them so much coffee they can't tell the difference between stomach ache and heartache a la us?"

Wilson too chides him with a glance. "You do recognise that we've hurt them, then? That they're part of this?"

House does; he baulks at it all the same.

"Hey, in that little contract of ours I swear I didn't sign on for polygamy."

Wilson snorts softly, tracks the milk amidst various home cooked meals that keep magically appearing in House's refrigerator whenever Cuddy and Cameron stop by. Wilson wrinkles his nose at a fuzzy green corner of pie – mouldering proof that even Foreman could be conned into culinary care-taking when House emerged, lamer and lonelier than ever, from his stint in Mayfield – then extracts a half-finished milk bottle and some slightly suspicious looking cream.

"Like you'd object."

House catches a glimpse of his partner's face as he finds the jugs for the milk and cream, feels a flutter of surprise that Wilson's lips are quirked, his eyes crinkled at the corners: symptoms of mild amusement rather than the edgy, if rational, jealousy he used to display at any mention of House's undisguised leering at Cuddy's curves, Cameron's slender stomach, and Chase's ass. Nonetheless, House pulls a face. For reasons that have less to do with Foreman's assets than his attitude, he objects:

"To three out of the four, no."

Then, reciprocating the softly touched sensation in his chest that Wilson's easy humour brought on, he reaches out and strokes his fingertips down the t-shirt clad spine before him in tactile affirmation that he too is teasing.

Wilson half-closes his eyes for a second, as if he might purr, then glances around, serious once more.

"Somehow I don't think offering make-up sex will go over quite the same way with Cuddy and your fellows as it does with you and I. _They_ follow social contracts. This may be an alien concept to you, but according to the rules of decent human behaviour –"

"—laid down in tablets of stone by your great-multiplied-by-several-thousand-grandpappy James Wilson the Whatever—"

"—we owe them an explanation. All of them."

House curls his fingers back, fidgets uneasily. He feints behind a jibe at Wilson's right to lecture him about this, to hide his unwilling agreement.

"Heritage rights aside, where d'you get this crap from? More hug and heal hocus-pocus from your rehab programme?"

Wilson eyes him insightfully. "Fifty bucks says it's part of yours too."

House scowls, unplugs the perc and introduces the glass jug to a ceramic mug with more force than necessary to dole out the coffee.

"No bet."

His knuckles turn white around the black plastic handle. Coffee swishes and splatters onto the countertop as he moves the jug to the next mug. House glares at his smeared reflection in the quavering splotches of dark liquid, the mess itself a mirror – he's sure – of his expression, too distorted to otherwise make out. He clunks the jug down, a second before he can drop it, and stares at the scratched black base of the frying pan hanging on a hook on the wall. Wilson's hurriedly snatched t-shirt – one of House's, with the Harley logo emblazoned in faded red on red on the front – is caught in an abstract smear by the convex polished metal of the pan's side. As Wilson mills about, hunting the sugar now, House squints at the crimson blur until it seems to turn liquid and bleed down the side of the pan.

What would it take to get Wilson to grab it off the wall? Make him swing and lash out so the reflected cloth becomes real blood, spilled across the tiles? To bring Foreman and Chase to their feet again, launch Wilson out onto the street? To make all of this as simple as the black and white of the walls that, right now, resemble a chessboard perilously close to checkmate?

He finds himself turning on his left heel, tongue primed; but Wilson has left the word-lock they were in to rootle through a nearby cupboard. A mound of packets accost him, unpopped corn, a heap of candy bars, a dozen packs of chips, and an overturned jar of Mom's strawberry jam that races off the highest shelf toward him. Wilson fields it like a pro. He half-twists with an armful of escapologist sweet goods to see if House has noticed and rolls his eyes in a mixture of amusement and disapproval at the multitude of E-numbers that comprise House's diet when Cuddy and Cameron haven't stopped by. The brewing tirade is expelled harmlessly with a snicker. His back to the countertop and the signs that the cavalry is still amassed to coral the loose horses long gone through the open barn door, House finds himself hoping that – if he counts to ten – wishes alone will be enough to find them gone.

He can't breathe like this, with them here, in this little world that is – that has always been – just his and Wilson's. His chest burns as though his lung is punctured again, his trachea deviating left, his throat clotted with blood from his fractured nose and broken jaw. The kitchen spins and, for a dizzying second, House is sure he will find himself flat out on his lounge rug, his heart thundering as if down the last fifteen minute stretch of a life's marathon, his vision all fog and fragments, and Wilson's fingertips brushing the back of his hand, his voice hoarse and horrified as he whispers: _Please don't leave me_.

"—ouse?"

He starts, stares first at Wilson's face, then sharply down at the warm fingertips laid lightly against his wrist. Wilson is beside him, taking over playing mother with the coffee cups. His hair is fluffy and rumpled, where it isn't slicked sticky and flat; the flush of sleep still suffuses his cheeks, as though they've woken alone, like they'd planned, for an idle day. But there are thread lines of anxiety around his eyes and he hasn't let go. It's as if…as if he's afraid that House's preoccupation is a prelude to telling him _to_ go.

House studies at him, realising but only half-seeing. He says nothing. He doesn't return the touch. But he stays as he is until Wilson steps reluctantly away to finish doling out the coffee.

"I'm not apologising," House says, abruptly, as Wilson settles the jug back into the percolator.

Wilson stills, cocks his head to consider him.

"No…" he says slowly. "You won't, will you. Apologising would mean that you'd have to be sure that you'll never hurt them that way again." He bites his cheek, unhappy with the significance of that, then determinedly looks on the bright side. "That's good, I think. You don't want to lie to them."

The truth of it puts House's hackles up.

"On second thoughts, it would make them go away. What the hell. Apologies all around! Coffee, sugar, sorry, there's the door."

"Once more with feeling," Wilson suggests, moving away to find a cloth and wipe up the spill.

House opens his mouth to volley that, but the compulsive rapidity of Wilson's flitting distracts him. He moves with a restless necessity that House remembers all too well, an animated herald of gathering temper forcibly deflected into meaningless tasks: dishes scrubbed until they squeak, the churning suction of the vacuum being forced back and forth, the sharp clap of journals being slapped into piles, the screech of a screwdriver adjusting a pipe, fixing the garbage disposal, or restoring hinges on a door slammed so hard it had come away from its frame.

Bracing to take a step back, half-frozen in Wilson's path, House recognises that he has no need to move an instant before he might startle his partner. There's no corralled savagery to Wilson's movements; it's an agitated urgency, trying to burn off excess adrenaline again, but with a tremble to it. His actions bespeak a man trying to convince himself that his body is being bluffed into being afraid, a man confronting a phobia, a man on the brink of panic.

"Wilson—" House starts, surprised and, in the same instant, surprised that he _is_ surprised by it.

He's already guessed that most of Wilson's rages came from a long-ago provoked reaction to raw terror.

"House, _please._" The cloth splats back into the sink with unnecessary force. "Can we just get this over with?"

Wilson stops where he stands and grips the edge of the draining board with both hands, not to hold himself down, but to keep himself from running. His profile is tense, face paling with his own desperate, determined, courage. He studies his own reflection in the tap, visibly loathes what he sees. Adds quietly:

"I don't want the last time they see me to be as the guy who beat you unconscious and then manipulated his way back into your bed for a coup-de-grace. I just want to apologise and g—"

He cuts himself off and House feels the sudden pause as if it has scraped out his innards ready to sling them against the nearest wall.

"And _what?_"

Wilson darts a hunted look at him, shakes his head mutely. House's fists ball and he has to fight to compulsion to shove Wilson into the cabinets and shake him until he stirs up some _sense._

"You were going to let them chuck you out," he accuses.

Wilson's lips twist in an uncomfortable grimace. That's it! His sudden stop had been only to get Foreman and Chase to relinquish their hold, to halt the escalating situation. House has a vision of Wilson holding up his hands, crossing the room to collect his duffle bag and letting himself out of the apartment for the final time. As his partner's eyes dip away from his, fury corkscrews through House so fiercely it takes his breath away.

Wilson's voice comes hoarse and defeated. "I'm still not sure that they wouldn't be completely in the right."

Neither is House, but a scathing expletive burgeons on his lips nonetheless. He discards it in favour of the outraged exclamation:

"They're no more objective than you are!"

They're _not_ right. So they can't have _the_ right. Even if they _are_, that doesn't automatically _give_ them the right to pass judgement. That has to be earned, fought for, granted, _gifted_— Not that anyone has bothered to ask _him._

"I…I don't know—" Wilson cuts in, rubbing his forehead, caught up in a conundrum of his own thoughts. "They're entitled to their opinions, House."

"And I'm not?" It comes out in a blast of hurt that he struggles to conceal, snapping like a dog with its tail to the wall. "I _don't_ get an opinion? Or, beg pardon, I get the one you give me. That's it, isn't it? I've got to take this with a 'yes master; no, master; three bags full, master'?"

"House – no!"

"No? You sure about that? You want me, Wilson. You want me, but you're so damn worried about what's right, what other people will think, that you're going to roll over and let _them_ decide. What about me? What do _I_ want?"

"I—I don't know!"

That stops House in his tracks. Wilson _always_ knew. He never let on quite how often the man was right in his long-winded lectures that psychoanalysed every aspect of House's character; he'd always figured Wilson didn't need any more power over him. But hearing him cry out like that, uncertain, of House, of himself, of wrong, right and where they stand in the middle of it, makes House feel as though the world has just skipped a revolution. Even at his worst, Wilson had known how wrong he was and he'd known – even when he denied it – some of what House had been doing to him too.

"You know," he threatens. It's almost a plea.

It doesn't look much like one, though, because Wilson, who has spun away from the sink, straightens and poises abruptly.

"Don't do this."

His voice has started to fray and he stirs on the spot, as if he too feels cornered. The hell he knows what _that_ feels like. House almost checks himself then, knows that Wilson does, but – in his own state – House can't resist making him feel like that again. As hard as they've been working to keep from turning their world into a battleground, there's no choice in it now. There's a fight coming and there's sides to pick and there's no goddamn way Wilson should be sounding the retreat before the terms have even been set.

"Do what?" he challenges. "This is _you_ doing this, Wilson. You and them, out there, the ones you think are good guys. The white hats. White coats. Drs. Shiny, Happy, Normal and _Boring_—!"

Wilson interrupts, grasping frantically at his unravelling control. "This isn't you against the world, House. It's _us_—"

"No!" House snaps. "It's not. It's you and me for as long as _you_ want it. The way _you_ want it."

He hasn't realised how close he's got to Wilson, that it's literally spitting distance, until there's a faint whistle of disturbed air. Wilson's let his breath out through his teeth. His body is braced, taut, but as House holds his own breath Wilson relaxes each muscle one by one. When only faint threads of tension remain, tightening the skin around his eyes, he says quietly:

"Low blow. Quit trying to fight _with_ me so you don't have to fight _for_ me." He half-smiles then, unconsciously mirroring the one House knows he bestowed upon him last night. "It's okay. You don't have to be there yet."

The lecturing riff is back and, all at once, House realises that he _is_ there. For the first time in a long while, he's not only on his own side, he's ready to share that side with someone else. Noticing how close his cane is to Wilson's left hand and that Wilson's right elbow is all but touching the scalding glass of the perc jug, he backs off and grabs two mugs from the counter, stacking them so that he can carry them in one hand.

"I want you, you idiot," he mutters gruffly and, with a sigh as he hobbles away: "C'mon. Once more into the breach…"

At the door he pauses, casts a glinting glance over his shoulder.

"Crying oh God! Jimmy! More, more!"

Wilson's grimacing grin steels him to face his friendly foes.

TBC...


	13. Chapter 13

Foreman takes his coffee blacker than his skin, a near match for the look in his inky eyes. House can imagine his fellow's thoughts as if they were his own. Foreman's been convinced for a long time that, for a world-renowned genius, his boss is extremely stupid. But he couldn't give a rat's ass what House gets up to in his private life – beyond how it impacts on him. If he's got to be heaving a whiteboard up and downstairs between the DDX room and whichever hospital ward his boss has wound up on this time, scribbling differentials on – and scrubbing them off – walls, doors and windows, doing twice the normal amount of legwork and bribing House with caffeine and candy not to kick him about like the proverbial cat, _then_ he's going to have an opinion on anything extra-curricular.

A hulking great part of Foreman sympathises with Wilson for smacking House's deranged, juvenile, delinquent head into the nearest wall at the first opportunity. God knows: Foreman wants to do the same. The rest of him is resigned to the fact that it will do no good, that House in a coma is bad for the patients and that House laid up in bed is even more of a jerk to work for than the gimpy, grumpy, mobile version. It's not altruism that brings Foreman here. But his disinterest is just as dangerous as Cuddy and Cameron and Chase's concern. Foreman's the only one who can go head to head with House objectively, take all emotion out of the equation and make him review this..._this_ with Wilson as if it were a cold case. To ask _is it worth it?_ and demand only the logical answer. House stuffs the spare coffee cup at him and limps as far away as possible.

He parks on the piano stool, subconsciously segregating himself from both Wilson and from his friends. Wilson passes around mugs and sets the tray laden with sugar, cream, milk and sweeteners on the table, not looking directly at anyone. His hands emptied, save for his own drink, he awkwardly accepts his imprisonment within the interrogative circle by perching on the other side of the battered sofa.

The silence is bristly.

Cuddy breaks it, whilst Wilson is visibly struggling to frame an appropriate opener.

"Thank you for the coffee, Doctor Wilson. You know, it had slipped my mind that you are working for Chicago Grace."

She turns a significant look on House, rebuking him for his lies to her and to his team. Her hostility is his justification; he answers with an _oopsy _face. Cuddy grits her teeth, returns to Wilson:

"Now I think about it, however, I distinctly recall supplying you with another reference…"

The pause dangles like a pair of police cuffs.

"I remember the conditions."

Wilson bows his head, stares into his coffee as if he wishes he could drown himself in it.

House tamps down on the urge to slosh his over both his boyfriend and his boss. Row or don't row. Bellowing and breakages are a lot easier to handle than daggered looks and inquisitorial silences. And over a lot faster.

Unfortunately, neither of them have learned telepathy in the last two years.

"Yet here you are."

Cuddy continues to rock her Magdalene of Discipline routine; even the rabid ducklings are deferring to her. Their silent denigration, their air of superiority, turns the lounge into a court. Cuddy and the kids: judge and jury. Pass the puke bucket and the razor blades. Cuddy's conditions were enough to give House a teenage angst complex the first time he heard them. Once Wilson's trial fell through, she'd agreed to supply him with references provided that he got the hell out of Princeton and stayed the hell out of Princeton and never contacted House again. It felt like the mother of all _you're grounded!_ riffs.

"I've been calling you." Wilson raises his head, voice unexpectedly taut, less deferential than House had figured he'd be. "You wouldn't pick up and you didn't return any of my messages. I left you three this week alone."

A muscle ticks in Cuddy's jaw. Outside, a car slices along the hushed street and disappears to leave the sense of domed silence surrounding them.

"To tell me about this?"

Cuddy gestures between her captive suspects with a mug. It is, appropriately, one she gave House. Red with white writing: I can only please one person per day. Today is not yours. Tomorrow doesn't look good either.

Wilson drops eye contact, shielding House from his own untruths. House slurps his coffee noisily enough to get everyone's attention and grimaces guiltlessly.

"Thaaaat may be my fault. He thought I'd asked permission for a sleepover."

"House, _none_ of this is your fault," Cameron interjects, insistent. "You're the victim here."

Chase's eyes sidle toward her, askance. House harrumphs abrasively, rolls his eyes; surely, after five and a half years, she knows him better than that.

"Can I have that on a coaster?" He grabs one off the top of the piano and zooms it at Wilson. "Here. Get out of jail free card."

Wilson catches the projectile, deliberately lays it down. He sets his coffee upon it and takes a deep breath.

Fuck. He really is going to apologise.

"Let's, uh, start again," he ventures, falling reflexively into placatory politeness he uses around irate patients and doing a remarkable impression of a man who does not resent having been hauled out of bed in his boxers and nearly given the heave-ho into the street. "It's good that you're here, that you're asking these questions. We've, uh, we've been meaning to talk to you for a little while now."

"How long?" Foreman demands, snaking a glance toward Cameron and Cuddy and an _I told you so_ expression at the ready.

"Two years," House shoots back, guessing what Foreman suspects.

_I told you so_ erupts silently amidst a collective gasp.

"Four months," Wilson corrects, looks to House for support.

He smirks at Foreman, backtracks with a confirmatory nod.

Cuddy raises her mug, conceals her expression. Foreman's hardly deflated; Chase wears a mask, mild amusement neutralising whatever he feels beneath; Cameron House might as well have kicked in the gut.

Wilson takes another deep breath and tries again, guardedly, trying to implicate neither of them in what had been, after all, a mutual lets-stick-our-fingers-in-a-socket first meeting.

"There was a phone call back in December and…we started talking. We-we had a lot to talk about. We know that…with the way our relationship ended…we know that—that further contact has been strongly discouraged – forbidden, until, well…"

He shrugs, glances at House. He doesn't need to say it; from the frank horror on their faces, the team quickly guess that the restraining order isn't active. Before they can start yammering he continues, still conciliatory but stuttering, relapsing into a childhood stammer that for the most part learned eloquence and assurance had long overcome.

"But we-we've both been through a lot of therapy since then—" He raises a hand when Cameron starts to cut in, appealing for quiet. He licks his lips quickly, seeks composure. "—and part of the standard programme is to make peace with the past, to resolve previous issues, exorcise the demons, as it were—"

"I guess I can see how you mixed that one up," Chase interrupts. "Exorcise. Exercise." His hips jig significantly in the bucket seat of the chair, blond cowlicks lolling over his impish eyes. "Typo on the pamphlet, huh?"

"Pagan ritual," House volleys reflexively. Despite the lightness of Chase's tone, he's stirred to defiance by Wilson's tentativeness and the ripples shivering across the surface of the mug he is gripping in both hands. "We're not all Catholics here, altar boy. Jimmy and I are more the naked dancing and blood letting type."

Foreman pretends to look under the red Turkish rug for a chalk pentagram.

"Way to work the Wicca," he drawls. "Wait. No. That's supposed to be a peace-loving religion. You pull some pseudo-Satanist shtick here, call it psychotherapy, start shtupping each other again and, what, we're supposed to _respect_ that?"

Unpleasantly surprised to hear himself so savagely imitated and wrong-footed by the heat in Foreman's voice – damnit, he's not objective, after all – House wrenches out a mocking smirk. In a tone that demands Foreman go stand on his own side of the bus, he counters:

"Ain't equal rights grand?"

Foreman glowers. Wilson winces. House bites his tongue on the end of the sentence. The fragile truce Wilson was trying to manufacture is in rags.

"That's enough." This from Cuddy, a sudden attempt to salvage the parley. "We came here because we were – we _are_ – concerned, Greg."

Her dark eyes hold his for a beat, release them to seek Wilson's meaningfully.

"I understand that the two of you felt the need to talk." In spite of her efforts, she doesn't keep the explaining-to-the-mentally-challenged note out of her voice. "That you may have needed some closure. I am hoping—" read: _demanding_, House supplies cynically "—that _this_," a swift, tight-lipped, over the shoulder glance in the direction of the bedroom, "is your way of establishing that."

She skims one hand down her skirt again. This time, the shift of the fabric reveals a small bulge. This is not a restraining habit; she has her phone in a pocket there, nine-one-one doubtless already dialled, waiting for her to hit call. House grinds his knuckles against the scalding side of his mug. _Bitch._

_Bright._ A voice in his head contradicts. Considering the carnage she'd encountered last time she'd had to stage an intervention…

House shifts uneasily as she persists coolly, her conviction rendering Wilson's efforts feeble.

"One of the things that I am sure both of you should have learned in therapy was how much harm has been done by your relationship."

Her gaze switches between them. Unsettled, House feels his hackles rise. She's so clipped, controlled – he'd be freakin' castrated, if he were to behave like her. Cuddy's composure is a cage that, if he doesn't watch his step, he could be lured into. Every statement is a secret question, coercing agreement. Oratory at its finest. Her smartness, trustworthiness, sneakiness, is seductive. A tug at his heartstrings reminds him what it's been like to be close to her, to feel safe—

_Snared._

A surge of frustration makes him want to tear at the walls of the linguistic trap she's setting. She's right. She's _right_. And damn her for it! But he's been limping wherever she leads for the last two years, because he was wounded, wretched, alone… and becoming hollow, restive, _bored._

With Wilson, he's all spark and spirit again, living on wit and will and adrenaline. He ignores how often the strain of _them_ stripped him down to bone, skin and abused substances. He curls his lip at Cuddy, jeers:

"Yes, mom."

"Lisa."

Somehow, her name comes out as a reproach to him. Wilson's grave eyes snag his for a second, a silent _please?_ A request for an ally. House matches it fiercely. _Fight, damnit; don't fall on your knees._ He's not sure if Wilson understands.

"We know," his partner states quietly. "We _know _how bad things had become between us, how much we were hurting each other_._ That's what we've been trying to work through over the last few months. We're trying to make amends. To—"

Another half-glance at House. He got it. But what the heck is his strategy – defence as attack? Hell. House sighs through his teeth, shoots for unity rather than a fractured front, and they finish the sentence together:

"Apologise."

Chase quirks an eyebrow. "Naked apologising?"

There's such mischief in his voice that House chews on a snicker. Wilson coughs and rubs the back of his neck, very deliberately avoiding House's eyes and an involuntary smile of his own. Cameron smacks her fiancé's arm.

"Robert! This isn't funny!"

Chase catches her hand before she can whisk it away, squeezes her fingers a little harder than is kind.

"I'm not laughing," he says, though the sparkle in his eye hasn't quite faded. "What _is_ funny is that I seem to be the only one of us," a swift room scan that includes only the other fellows and Cuddy, "who's _not_ treating this like some sort of sick joke—"

"It _is_ sick—" Foreman asserts, before Cameron curtails him.

"House nearly _died_!" She turns to House, her Bambi eyes filled with sympathy and misunderstanding. "Look at yourself. You're avoiding everyone again, skipping nights that you'd started to work late, blowing off bowling with me and Robert. For what? For Wilson?" Her delicate features harden. "You're trying to act like we're wrong to be worried that he's here and you won't even sit down next to him."

Caught out umpiring his own tug of loyalties between his pets and his sometime partner, sometime punisher, House blows it off with a noisy exhalation.

"A little handholding and honey-bunching would convince you? Some care and share crap?"

He stretches out as if to take Wilson's hand, but avoids it when Wilson releases one side of his mug to return the clasp, snatches at the coffee instead. Wilson rolls his eyes, lets him have it. Cuddy makes a small sound in her throat, as though she's trying not to laugh. Cameron purses her lips, shakes her head in surrender as House slurps smugly. She knows she walked into that.

"Cute," Foreman says flatly, undeterred. "How many times has House nearly got himself offed, Allison? You're the only one still keeping score—"

"Five," Wilson interjects softly. "Plus the time it was my fault."

Foreman ignores him, jerks a sturdy finger in House's direction. "Your shrink told you to get a hobby for a _reason_. Passive suicide doesn't count."

His flinch as he lowers his bruised hand, nurses his rapped knuckles against the warmth of his green mug, is all that warps House's first explosive response into a vindictive smirk.

"You want to get life for illegal assistance?" he offers brutally. "'Cause if not, you better get gone. 'S'my right as an adult – as an _American_ – to screw up my life any which way I want."

As one, Wilson and Cuddy inhale and sigh deeply. Wilson pinches the bridge of his nose, bows over his knees. Cuddy tilts her head back and closes her eyes in silent prayer to some god hidden in the ceiling.

"What if they're serious?"

It sounds like pure naivety and, with Chase, it could go either way. His colleagues gawp at him, but House narrows his eyes, wonders what the nosy jerk has discovered. He'd always been more watchful of Wilson than either of the other two, yet his efforts to lighten the conversation from a Red Alert to an Amber and this honest inquiry suggest his opinion of the man hasn't done the same one-eighty that the others' have.

Foreman scoffs. Even Cameron, Queen Credulous, goggles as though her fiancé has left his brain behind.

"Good question," Cuddy says into the stunned silence. Her tone hasn't thawed one bit. She turns her interrogative stare on first Wilson, then House. "Well?"

It sounds a lot like a challenge.

House finds himself on his back foot again. He'd expected the baying of the wolves, expected to shout them down, send them out whining with the tails between their legs, to give him hunted looks and bare their teeth at him for months after. And still to lick his wounds for him if this whole thing with Wilson went to hell again sooner rather than later. He'd not expected Cuddy to come at all.

Now here she is threatening to _listen_. To give them the benefit of the doubt. To offer the chance that Wilson so badly wants, instead of the rollicking they probably deserve. Overhead, with perfect timing, his neighbour starts some sort of weekend DIY project. The hammering reverberates through the apartment like a drumbeat prelude to: _ready, aim,_ _fire_!

House backs off, speaks under the din:

"I'm done. If you want a recap on the whys and whatevers, you don't need what I just said."

Cuddy captures his evasive gaze with hers, spears the sincerity beneath the surface, a darting shot of heart-to-heart connection that makes House hurt, sudden and deep, as if she's pierced a part of him he's spent so long pretending isn't there he's half forgotten it. He sucks in a breath as the pain shoots down to his thigh, reaches instinctively for the Vicodin he doesn't have in his pocket. _Coward_, his conscience taunts him, and he lifts his chin, speaks gruff but clear.

"Fine. _I'm sorry._ I screwed all of you up too and I don't have the right to do that."

He shies away from the sudden softening of all his team's glances: the way Cameron's lower lip pooches between her teeth, Chase's brief nod, the contortions of Foreman's physiognomy between satisfaction, embarrassment and suspicion.

"I'm sorry too," Wilson chips in softly. "I really can't say that enough. After what I did to House – knowingly, systematically, and continuously – and by extent the effect that had on all of you, I have no right to ask for your forgiveness. I'm not. Please understand: I'm not apologising for my own sake; I'm apologising because _you_ deserve it. You should never have had to go through that and I'm sor—"

"Stop right there."

Cuddy holds up one hand. Framed between her dark curls, her features are paralysed like the stage of a bitter tragedy seconds before curtain close. Wilson stalls, shocked; House glares. Even Foreman seems taken-aback.

"Stop," Cuddy repeats, the word spat, disgusted. She stabs a forefinger at Wilson, furious. "Don't you _dare_ rattle off a textbook apology to me! If we were ever really friends, then you _will_ do me the courtesy of telling me what _you_ need to say, not what you think _I_ want to hear."

Wilson's gulp is audible. His hand flexes on his knee, nervously enough that House regrets again having sat apart, having not taken his hand instead of his drink.

He expects Wilson to stumble again here, to deflect behind one of his personas masquerading as truth, to con Cuddy into believing him with his reflexive ability to become whatever anyone else needs him to be. Instead, Wilson looks down at his hands, studies their anxious perambulation over the crisp denim of his jeans, and nods.

"Okay."

He speaks hesitantly, addresses the floor.

"Then I stand by what I said. You have every right to be livid with me and to want me as far away from House as possible. You do. A big part of me knows I deserve that. But…but in my defence, you don't know what it was like."

He looks up then, with a kind of caustic hurt that is more daunting to view than the eerie composure of his rages.

"You—" He swings a look around at the ducklings, who are set-lipped and sceptical. "You didn't know him before the infarction. And you—" This to Cuddy. "You met him _once_, as the smart-mouthed jerk in the bookshop and dizzyingly hot genius who you spent a wild night with after a party. You didn't _know_ him.

"You can't imagine what it was like to get to know him, to become the closest friend of this incredible impossible man, who's so intelligent he makes most of the world look dumb. To be around someone that…that _passionate, intense,_ and _energetic. _To go from playing tennis and basketball, running miles, and talking the world in and out of tangles…

"…to watching him merge with the sofa. To have all-night conversations become the drone of the TV, the glug of a bottle. To watch him refuse to do the most basic things to help himself recover: handrails, walk-in showers, physical therapy… To see him scarf endless pills. To make panicked midnight trips to the E.R every time he overdosed. To see him hooked up to morphine time and again. To find the box at home where he's been injecting it, unprescribed, behind your back. To have every effort you make to help ignored or answered with a threat – a threat so fierce that it scares you in ways you didn't know you _could_ be scared. To have him turn to you for comfort some nights and other nights laugh in your face…"

His voice wavers. Perhaps he looks at House, but House can't look back. He stares elsewhere, studies the foot pedals of the piano until his sock prints in the dust swell into hyper-focus. His stomach is twisting itself into granny knots, remembering Wilson's worried eyes, his shaking hands, his chalk-white cheeks, and the orchestra of his voice working through _sotto_ reassurances, sympathy and solutions, to _staccato_ lectures, _fortissimo_ yells, and the sudden discordant crash of his desperate fist. He remembers the stifled hitches of Wilson's broad bare back as he buried his face in his pillow, silently sobbing when he thought House was asleep. The nights he was still on his knees when House woke in the early hours, picking up every last shred of broken glass and wiping the liquor off the walls, blood drying on his knuckles, nose and mouth. He remembers too the nights he, House, would watch through seething slatted eyes, fingering the pinprick where he'd jabbed the morphine needle into the bend of his arm, his stomach starting to caudle the longer Wilson lay staring at the ceiling, too exhausted to cry, too afraid to go to sleep, waiting up to check every half hour that House was still breathing.

House clenches his fists around his coffee mug, sick that the memory of Wilson's pain makes his tongue water with the need to taste the bitter powdery coating on his Vicodin, to take again the one damn thing that always caused it – and made him, House, hardly care.

"You can't imagine," Wilson goes on, raggedly. "What it was like. To watch him pull it together, to start to get better, to go back to work and to be himself again there – almost. But to come home to come home to find the kitchen knife missing and blood on the floor. To find him unconscious, hardly breathing, one shoe on, one shoe off, where he's collapsed just inside the door from an overdose. To have him want you and want to hurt you so badly you can't even gasp. To live on a perpetual rollercoaster between his madcap reality and kissing distance from mortality. You just…you can't understand what that does to you."

He stops suddenly, as if he's sure he's said too much. Cameron interjects sharply:

"You could have left."

House wrestles with the urge to clonk her on the head with his cane. And Wilson too. This is worthless. He's wasting his breath. His fellows see enough of House's pain and pain mismanagement to think that they _do_ understand; they see so much that they don't realise that they see very little; they can't imagine that there's worse, more.

Foreman seconds: "You should've handled it."

Wilson nods, silent and defeated, he too realising that words cannot convey what he withstood.

The hell they can't. House bangs his coffee cup aside and steps up in his partner's defence.

"Are you _blind_?" he blasts them, severing the disapproving silence that has fallen. "He _could_ have left me. He _didn't._ You can make him a monster all you like, but that's as real as the bogeyman under the bed! You're dumping your crap on him, so you don't have to feel guilty wondering what went on all the times _you_ wimps begged Wilson to come and talk me down because I was being an ass again! News flash: sometimes talking _is_ just sex!"

"God forbid we ever had a conversation," Wilson murmurs, rolling his eyes.

Cameron overrides him, shrill and frantic: "House, you're not thinking clearly! I know you think you love him but—"

"But _what_?" The gunfire of the hammer overhead amplifies. "He's the bastard here, because I was the one bleeding at the end of it?"

"House, victims of domestic abuse—"

Foreman. Pamphlet-speaking. _Polly want a cracker?_

"Wake up, Foreman! There's more than one kind of domestic abuse."

That shuts him up. Wilson's head jolts up too, a raw astonishment on his face that it makes House ache to see. He _knows._ He's put together what House was doing to him and what it means in terms of that social contract nonsense. He's shocked to the core that House is willing to confess it openly. A quick glance at the others finds Chase cynical and not at all surprised. Cuddy has an air of exasperated resignation.

"I. Baited. Him."

House goes on, since Cameron's quizzical expression indicates she needs it spelling out.

"Don't think I can do it?" He turns to the other ducks, wolves, whatever they are, and drops the anvil. "Think again: I've pissed you two off before. And you've hit me for it. It took hell of a lot less to get both of you to shove a fist in my face than it took Wilson."

Chase wrinkles his nose, as if he's chagrined, but he seems too thoughtful for that. Foreman comes back swinging.

"Neither of us ever hit you so hard or repeatedly that we fractured your right femur, left tibia and fibula, chipped your hip, ruptured your spleen, bruised your kidneys, smashed seven ribs, punctured a lung, broke both bones in both your forearms, your collarbone, your jaw, your nose, and knocked you unconscious with such force that you were in a coma for four days."

Wilson closes his eyes. If he's ever heard that list before, he shrinks and sickens as though it's the first time. House's temper flares, fighting a flashback. Chase speaks up before he can snarl.

"You couldn't stop, could you?"

Wilson's eyes flick open, swerve to him. Then to the silent Cuddy. She glances first at House, then back to him, and reads the sudden pause as if it affirms something that she has suspected for a very long time.

"You were sick, weren't you?"

Wilson nips the inside of his lip and nods. He wouldn't have offered his reason unasked, but the look on his face is one of pure relief.

"Yes."

Abruptly, the hammering above stops.

Wilson tells his story in a low voice, as neutrally as he can. Hearing it again, House catches more of the tone than the tale, sees the faint starbursts of wrinkles deepen at the corners of Wilson's eyes, the downward twitches of his lip, the moments where his mouth keeps moving, but his voice falters. The shame and self-reproach are as raw as the first time. Not once does he try to excuse his actions.

By the time he has finished, Foreman has relented. To him, biology is a man's kryptonite; there's no overcoming it. Chase has relaxed, folded his arms behind his head, watching the pieces of the puzzle clicking into place. But Cuddy's hands move constantly over her skirt, fisting folds, smoothing them out. When Wilson is finally silent, she swears under her breath.

"I should've known." There's anger in her voice; she quietens it quickly as Wilson casts her an anxious look. "I should've—The results of your medicals…I thought they looked iffy several times. But you weren't reporting any behavioural symptoms. You lied to your physicians. To me."

Those last words come harsh enough to make Wilson wince, but her nails bite reprovingly into her own palms. Her eyes swivel to House, seek his forgiveness; he answers the glance, non-committal. She doesn't look for Wilson's; she cannot see her mistake as worse than his untruths. Nonetheless, she continues to castigate, half to them, half to herself.

"I should've put it together when I first realised what was going on between you two." She shakes her head, causes a cyclone of curls to sweep across her cheeks. "I _knew_ something wasn't right. I _knew_—"

She flashes a look at Wilson, chin up, daring him to find fault in her.

"I should've asked. I've kept giving you good references because you've always been an excellent and empathic doctor. I should've known that that was the real you."

Wilson swallows hard, shuts down his own feelings in respect for hers. House wants to rattle him. This sincere civility antagonises him, alarms him; Wilson's worst outbursts come when he feels most subsumed by his situation, most close to staggering under the weight of his endeavours to help others.

"It's all real," Wilson corrects quietly. "Being sick doesn't exempt me from responsibility. I should've told my doctor, back when I first started to scare myself. By the time you saw, it was already past due. I could've told you then, and I didn't. I'm not a saint, Cuddy, sickly or otherwise. But…I'm—I've had and I'm still _having_ treatment for my problems… so I don't think I'm Mr. Hyde either."

"A few potions – that doesn't make your bad side go away." Cameron, sudden and scorching. "What's inside you is inside _you_. You tried to _kill_ House. _You're_ capable of that. The tumour was a catalyst. It didn't make you a different person. Lots of people live with these tumours and _they_ don't go around beating on their boyfriends or girlfriends or families. It's not as though you could have pled grounds of diminished responsibility in court. You should've gone to jail."

Wilson hears her out. His fingers seek his wrists, habitually feeling for cuffs to loosen, cinch uncomfortably around bare skin. House represses another wish that he'd sat beside him, could lean into him. Nothing to do with benefiting Wilson. He can squirm this one out. Everything to do with needling Cameron. This crush of hers has grown crush_ing_. There's a whole lot of biochemistry between makes-me-happy-in-my-panties kinda affection and defend-to-the-death love. It nettles him that she has found something in him – and in herself – to take up residence in between.

"That would absolve him, would it?"

This from Chase and, ironically, _that_ crush-come-colleagues-come-chums thingymajig doesn't make House twitch so much. Cameron gapes at her fiancé, taken aback.

"It would be a start!"

"Straight up punishment?" Chase queries.

House can't help himself. "Pre-cooked meals and cable TV."

Chase fights the twitch of a smile and ignores him, focuses on Cameron. "He went to rehab, Allison, and into surgery, and back to rehab after that. And he's on medication. That's time and penance and a hell of a lot more use than a pumpkin suit and a cell block."

Cameron shakes her head and, with a skip of his heart, House realises why she unnerves him. She sees the world as things ought to be, imagines a justice system that really works, a fixer-upper fantasy that she's young enough yet to be unable to – quite – accept how often the reality falls short, even as she sees it happening. She's like a little girl, chanting to herself: _I do believe in fairies, I do believe in fairies_. He, House, had those kind of fantasies once, before he came to the conclusion that most people are idiots. It sort of smarts to be reminded of his own ideals and what it feels like to roast them on the campfire of everyday chaos.

It stings worse because it reminds him of Wilson. And that sometimes he brought House very close to believing he was a better man that he'd long ago given up trying to be. Geez, no wonder Cameron's so pissed at him.

"So that's it," she's demanding, looking from one to the other as though she cannot believe her ears. "We're just supposed to forgive him?"

That thickens the atmosphere until its nearly sandstone. Understanding is one thing, forgiveness another. Foreman's allegiance shifts imperceptibly to her side once more. He's not going to be hanging up the welcome home banners any time soon.

"I think," Cuddy speaks with considered precision. "That we all may need to sleep on this one."

TBC…


	14. Chapter 14

It feels later than it is when Cuddy shoos the ducklings out. They depart amidst the simmering silence of Chase and Cameron's unfinished argument: when it comes to Wilson her moral compass is as steady as a rock; his is like a pirate's that doesn't point north but to the x over a heart. _Cross it and hope to die_, Wilson thinks, making a fist on his knee. He has nothing more substantial than a schoolyard rhyme to prove he never wants to injure House again. Is that desire enough? Or is it the wicker of a hand-basket hurtling on a riptide of other emotions straight toward hell?

Behind House's fellows, an unexpectedly sanguine stripe of sunlight spills in when the main door opens. The weather has cleared. It's high noon. When Cuddy doesn't leave too, Wilson knows that they're nowhere near the end of the showdown in the Last Chance Saloon. It occurs to him, as the door snips off the stream of sunshine, that they're going to miss the jazz festival.

Cuddy turns from the door to face them. House lurches up and limps over to plonk down significantly beside Wilson. Cuddy folds her arms. Her dark eyes become slits of adamantine, trained on Wilson. He knows what she is thinking. Now she's had time to gather herself and no longer needs to remain in control in front of her junior colleagues, her anger coalesces into a dark and doughty demeanour. There is, in her mind, no excuse for his being here, not after what happened. She might have accepted his apology for that; accepted, that is, that he needs to apologise. It does not mean she will forgive him.

He hasn't forgiven himself. For the hundredth time, he wonders what he and House think they are doing here. The patch of carpet Cuddy stands on has the telltale fuzzy-edge of bleaching where industrial cleaner was used to get the blood out. House was too idle or indifferent to have the whole room done at the same time. The walls behind her are the same colour, but the paint has been redone to cover the spatters and stains. Everything appears very much as it was before. He wonders how often she's stood here since that night, personally nursing House back to physical health and trying to persuade him to move on.

Jealousy paws and sweeps its horns at that. But he looks away from the hot spots of colour high on her cheeks and tells himself there is no red rag. There could have been no triumph in it for her. She, after all, had long foreseen the wreckage of what he and House had once been.

He cannot look at her for a moment as he remembers the first few cautious inquiries she'd made, only a few months after House had brazenly announced they were together. _Are you happy, Wilson? Are you sure?_ She'd seen the rifts and the tensions that quickly developed, as the pressures of working and living together with no respite began to trigger old and learned behaviour patterns in them both. She'd seen the fragility and the hidden shock behind their intense closeness the day after Wilson first finished a heated argument with his fist. _Are you two all right?_ She'd noticed the days he'd walked around in a daze, while House sullenly avoided him. _Seriously, you two, is everything okay?_

Her watchful eyes had kept track of his growing defensiveness, polite avoidance, and false assurances, matched his Mary Sunshine act against the nights she'd found House sleeping in his office or turning up, unexplained, on her doorstep to cadge her couch after midnight and carpool to work in the morning. It had been House's apartment they were living in. She'd known early on, that things were not as fine as they both insisted.

She'd questioned him when he withheld painkillers from House, appealed to his medical judgement. _Do you really think this is the right approach? You know that you can't force him to quit._ She'd been reluctant to go along with his increasingly underhand attempts to make House see sense over his drug use. _You're hurting him, Wilson. This isn't helping._ She'd seen the times House flinched from a gentle hand, the later hours they were both working and their erratic oscillation from fierce closeness to barely restrained hostility. She'd called him on it, outright, at last: _House has bruises this morning, Wilson. What happened last night?_

He lied to her every time. He'd blown her off, shown hurt real and affected, placated her, been insulted, determined that she must not find out. He told himself that things weren't that bad, that they'd made it up to each other, that if House had forgiven him it was none of her business. He'd been so sure he'd get through to House somehow. Then he'd been sure he himself could stop. Each time he'd promised them both that he would; but the very next time it had been even worse. The guilt and the dread and the constant threat that someone would discover their gritty secret had intensified the knife-edge of anger he'd begun to live upon. A week after he'd sworn, hand on heart, that this would be the last time, it had been.

He'd knelt in House's blood and called her. It was after ten on a weeknight, a Wednesday in a dingy December when the streets were slushy with grey gritty snow. She'd been working late, was about to go home. When she'd picked up the phone, he'd said only:

"You were right. Send an ambulance and the police. House's apartment."

She'd come herself, the emergency services in tow, pushed him aside from where he'd been crouched on the floor keeping House from asphyxiating. She'd said not a word to him. She'd taken over and never looked back until he was being handcuffed and led away. There had been nothing left in her eyes of the friendship they'd once shared.

There's nothing left of it now.

"You should leave," she says stonily, her whole stance indicates the door: _there lies your way._

He looks up at her through his hands, defenceless. The weight of his conscience, of his memories, are unmanning him and, for once, he hardly cares. The objectionable voice is squawking, but far off, muffled beneath a tide of nausea that swells biliously up from his stomach. It burns at his throat, sets his pulse thrumming in his ears, sparks a stinging behind his eyes that fractures her face into messy diamond-like fragments. He has to blink hard to clear them.

"I know."

House's hand lands solidly on his shoulder, the grip half-restraint, half-request.

"No."

"I can't _make_ you stop seeing him, House." With no small amount of bitterness she adds, "I never could."

"No," House repeats, but there's a softer edge to it. No quarter, but a shade of regret for the inevitable collateral. He hitches one shoulder in an _c'est la vie_ shrug. "What can I say? I'm an addict."

And that makes Wilson what? His drug? The _one_ thing he strove so hard to keep House from relying upon. His worst, most destructive, dangerous need – and Wilson himself has become it? He buries his head in his hands again, tugs at fistfuls of hair in self-reprimand. Why, _why_, did he ever picked up the phone?

With no words, no structure, no way to regulate the wild spiral of his emotions, he's overcome by a sudden rush of adrenaline. He scarcely hears Cuddy say:

"House, you've been having treatment. Are you really going to throw away _two years_ of recovery now?"

Nor House's dry: "Guess it didn't take."

The next words that make it through the ratcheting roar of half-formed thoughts and feelings are Cuddy's stern, serious:

"Are you on Vicodin again?"

And that delicate fluttering of trust, awakening just this morning from its prolonged coma, collapses back into darkness once more.

"Oh God."

Wilson sheers away from House's hold on him, words choking him, chest too tight to breathe. Why hadn't he thought of that? House hadn't been sober last night; that it might have disguised it…

"Oh for—!" House bites off the exclamation with an audible snap of his teeth. "No! No. I am not on Vicodin."

_Wish I were_ is loud, but unspoken. He tosses an impatient look at Cuddy, bends his brittle countenance toward Wilson's involuntary recoil.

"You," he points out, crassly but fairly, "Have had your tongue in most places I could've stashed any. Are _you_ high right now?"

The question hangs about longer than it should. They both know that was never Wilson's way, but he's on his own medication now and he's too scared of himself ever to come off it. What _is_ addiction, after all?

_What price us?_

Both of them are triggered right now. Yet Wilson doesn't feel as though they're anywhere close to a fight. House's craggy features droop like melting wax. Not antagonistic, but growing guarded, wary of the influence Cuddy has on them both. He sits stiffly, paused, as if he suspects Wilson's sudden shy is a prologue to departure; he's trying to summon his familiar indifference, to make out that he can handle this with a _whatever_ and a hand waved impatiently toward the door. Wilson doesn't think he can stand up and leave even if House does pre-emptively insist on setting off on another long lonely downward spiral. He dips his head toward his knees, dizzy, wonders if he might pass out.

"I'm sorry," he croaks, not actually certain which part of his jumbled reaction he's apologising for.

He reaches for House's nearest knee, his left, and moulds his own fingers around the bony geography; the warmth of his skin and the smooth lines of healthy muscle beneath his palm bridging the reopening gulf between them.

_Don't leave me, House. Please. I'm trying here. I am. And I know you are too. Don't give up now because you think we might lose this round._

Since he doesn't speak, he doubts the anxious squeezes of his clammy fingers can convey his thoughts in silent Morse. He half-expects House to say without explanation, _I'm sorry too_, to lever himself up and go out with Cuddy, abandon Wilson alone to gather his things. Instead, House dismisses the last few minutes of conversation with a characteristic snort, steals Wilson's coffee mug back off the table where it had been set down, and finishes the lukewarm liquid. Without so much as a glance to acknowledge that he's doing it, he slides his left hand over Wilson's right and interlocks their fingers securely on his knee.

Wilson's vision goes kaleidoscopic and it takes another few blazing blinks and a hard gulp before he can look up to find Cuddy contemplating them with canted head and pursed lips. She has shifted one hand to her hip and her brow is criss-crossed with crinkles of annoyance, aware that there are layers of subtext being exchanged to which she is not party.

Pulling himself together with a Herculean effort, Wilson says wryly: "This looks pretty bad, huh?"

"Dismal," Cuddy concurs. She gestures towards the yellowing greenish protuberance that still lingers just above House's temple. "Is this your handiwork?"

"Hey! Back off, Queen of Hearts," House growls. He snatches his hand free of Wilson's to flatten his palm over his forehead and most of his left eye to scowl at her, pirate-like. "Did come of the old high seas, arrrh."

Cuddy blinks at him. Wilson translates a split-second faster.

"Way to be clear, Long-John Silver."

House smirks and props his elbow on Wilson's nearest shoulder so he can keep his hand over his eye comfortably.

"Nah, this was in pursuit of one of those hobbies everyone keeps telling me to get. I introduced my face to a boom."

"To a _what?_"

"It's part of a ship," Wilson starts to explain. "We were sailing—"

Cuddy's eyebrows arch so high they disappear under her fringe.

"Sailing."

"I sail now. Badly, apparently. I forgot to reef."

"To _what_?"

"It—"

"Never mind," House breaks in impatiently. "Gust of wind swung a piece of wood into my head. It was an accident."

Cuddy's answer is painfully mild.

"Isn't it always?"

_Ouch._

House echoes: "_Ow."_ His eyes do a sidelong slide toward Wilson, before he reminds Cuddy: "Words can hurt too, y'know."

Cuddy purses her lips, but she yields first in the lengthy stare they exchange. Overhead, the noisy neighbour resumes his DIY project. The purr of duct tape underlines the break in the conversation.

As the _urr-rur urr-rur_ of a saw starts up, Cuddy addresses Wilson once more, slowly, as though she is still taking stock of the situation.

"You sail?"

He shrugs, somewhat hampered by House's hold on him, and takes the respite in the interrogation gratefully.

"I also have a dog."

"You _what?_" House this time, letting Wilson's hand go to exaggerate his genuine astonishment to epic proportions.

_Oh, damn._ Wilson ducks his head, scratches awkwardly at the back of his neck. They'd not been to his apartment whilst House was in Chicago, playing it safe by sticking to neutral public places. He's momentarily forgotten that he has yet to mention his new family.

Somewhat sheepishly, he rectifies that: "My, uh, shrink concluded that I have no experience with unconditional love. So, I, uh—"

"You got a dog."

The flat mockery in the statement makes him circle his eyes toward the ceiling, peeved without really being upset about it. It's actually easier to take than the gravity that continues to press down from Cuddy's quarter.

"Yeah, House. I got a dog."

House is incredulous.

"A pee in your pot plants, steal your slippers, eat off your plate dog?"

Wilson parries, quick and instinctive:

"I was missing you."

House snickers loudly. Cuddy opens her mouth, looking thoughtful; Wilson tenses, realises he's given away a little more of the story he kept back. He has, after all, yet to mention anything to her about his relationship with his father. But her question is intended to be innocuous:

"What's it called?"

Having never actually expected to have to have this conversation from his exile in Chicago, Wilson stalls.

"He." The name reluctantly comes out in an embarrassed throat-clearing. "Hippo."

"Hippo?"

"Hippocrates."

House catches on, evil delight snaking across his face.

"As in Hippocratic oath?"

Wilson squares his jaw, _knows_ House will make something of it, and sighs.

"Yeah."

"Do no harm," Cuddy guesses softly, her eyes curious as if she is reappraising him, remembering the friend she thought she knew, before sickness and circumstance made him a monster in her mind.

Wilson nods.

House is chortling, deep in his throat. "Did you buy a mutt or a metaphor?"

Wilson shoots him a disgruntled look and gives up trying to protect himself.

"A retriever."

Even Cuddy joins in the outburst of laughter.

When the brief hilarity has subsided, Cuddy hooks a toe around the piano stool. She draws it over to the coffee table so that she can sit facing them. She loops a few errant curls behind one ear and sets her folded arms on her knees. The ribbed cuffs of her simple pink v-neck inch up to display her leather-strapped watch and a silver filigree bracelet.

"Look," she says seriously. "It's becoming quite obvious here that I don't know the whole story about what happened between you two and why. And I don't want to be the one crying 'off with his head,'" a wry glance at Wilson, "if there's a good reason I should be saying off with _yours._" A brief frown for House. "I am also not going to ask what it is that you are withholding – this time – since I'm well aware that you are both working through some difficult personal issues. But I am going to ask this: what on earth makes you think that a do-over between you is going to go any better than before?"

_Good question._

Wilson's shoulders slump. Despite their poolside pact, despite having asked himself that so many times since they agreed to meet, he has yet to be sure of an answer.

"Well, duh!" House exclaims, as if it's blindingly obvious. "Love conquers all."

Cuddy gives him beady eyes. "Hate to burst your bubble: Santa isn't real either."

House mimes astonishment, devastation, but there's an unease to the expression and he starts to rub his leg. Her question has hit home and another that bobs in her throat, unasked:

_So, you _do_ love him?_

He could be wrong, but Wilson is almost sure that's it. That Cuddy always assumed they'd stumbled together somehow, some night or seven, drunk or lonely, wrestling or bickering or daring and then…it had happened. A line crossed. Lips and hands and _huh_ next morning. House liked to take; Wilson liked to give. That something kept happening and…that was that. No drama there. Cuddy had, he thought, suspected that half the tempests came from their being too close, from neither really wanting the friendship to have changed, neither sure it would survive if they changed it back.

House frowns at her and shifts ever so slightly, leans into him, a long warm press of strong shoulder and hip, silent support, silent _need you_. Wilson presses back instinctively, _here._ A split-second later, he almost tenses. That need had shattered him once before; his inability to leave nearly caused House's death. His throat gets hot and narrow as he realises the bond feels safe again: strong but still careful, neither pushing too hard for too much. He swallows vigorously, disturbed and increasingly drained by the constant flux of his emotions.

House pulls faces at Cuddy, scrunching his lips from side to side; she cocks a brow at him, waiting. His right hand kneads at his leg again. His fingers freeze at a sudden spasm.

"Hold that thought."

_Idiot. _Wilson gets to his feet, reproaching himself. It's been over two hours since they woke and neither one has had a chance to take any meds yet. No wonder he feels ropey.

"Excuse me a moment."

With a gentle bump of House's shoulder with his, Wilson climbs to his feet and escapes to the privacy of the kitchen.

The air in the open-plan room is cooler, clearer. Logic decrees that this is attributable only to the chinked window behind the sink, the vaguely gasoline-tasting breeze drifting in from the street, and the lack of plaster dust being shaken down from Mr. Don't-Do-It-Yourself upstairs. Wilson lingers nonetheless, gathers his pills, fills a water glass, and stands over the sink for a few moments simply counting in long deep breaths.

His guts squirm and there's a skittery-jittery sense of confusion scratching at his skin; the fearful, bewildered, helpless feelings always used to be a prelude to rage. Now, he wishes he could just sit down and cry himself clean, wash away all the hurtful harrowing memories of his past, and House's, and theirs, and start over. But if wishes were horses he'd be a vet not a doctor. He settles for a sigh, rinses his glass out and locates House's medications next to the biscuit tin, where he always used to keep his Vicodin.

The bottle has changed since their meeting in the café. Holding it up to the light from the window, Wilson jiggles the jumbled contents until he can make out an entirely new regime: an analgesic, an anti-depressant, the blood-thinner he's been on since his infarction, and sleeping pills. He makes no attempt to figure out the doses, simply palms the bottle and returns to the lounge.

House has hobbled off to pee and Cuddy waits for him alone. Wilson sets the bottle on the coffee table and resumes his seat. They don't try to make small talk. They merely wait, listening to the flush of the toilet, the trickle of the taps, and the sounds of House wrestling with a damp towel no doubt stuffed more behind than hung upon the rail. It's a relief when he limps back in: some indefinable shift seems to have rendered him the mediator, as though all the festering enmity had originally been between Wilson and Cuddy.

"We, uh, we don't know if it's going to work," Wilson volunteers.

A dull ache has settled in his chest. He's made new friends, of course, a handful from the psych ward and some tentative connections in Chicago; but his forcedly nomadic lifestyle has been chequered by brief superficial encounters in which he hides behind pure persona, against all his shrink's advice not daring to reveal his rocky history. He's missed House so much that every uninterrupted sentence, unmet grin, and uninhabited expanse of bed snaps at his heartstrings, twanging them like a brat boy grabbing his girl's bra strap; he's been Tantalus, parched and emaciated; Prometheus praying his heart will stop so that it cannot be torn out again day after day. He hasn't appreciated, in comparison, how very much he's missed Cuddy. How much he wanted her to answer his calls.

"There's no magic eight ball for this," House adds, brusque and rapidly getting bored with the conversation. He shakes out the pills he needs, gulps them down dry. "Have at if you wanna consult a psychic or read coffee grounds or whatever."

He leans forward and shoots Wilson's empty mug toward her across the table.

"I know relationships don't come with guarantees." Cuddy chastens him with a stern look. "They're not spin-dryers. But this isn't a normal relationship. I don't want a repeat of my staff simultaneously running tests on their colleague and friend, whilst testing themselves as emergency organ donors. And I never _ever_ want to see one of my best friends unconscious on a stretcher," hurt hollows her cheeks as she studies House, the memories shimmering in her eyes, "or," the pain deepens as she turns to Wilson, "my other best friend in the back of a police car. I certainly don't want it to be because they are each responsible for putting the other one there."

House shifts uncomfortably. "This isn't about you."

"Yes, actually, it _is._" Cuddy rubs her hands on her skirt, masks a slight tremor that runs through them. "You're asking for a lot of trust here—"

"Getting censure."

Wilson tightens his grip when House tries to draw his hand away; he scowls but closes his tongue behind his teeth. Cuddy continues:

"We trusted you – both of you – and you betrayed that." Wilson cannot look away when she shifts her focus to him. "You in particular, we trusted. There's a lot of good in you, Wilson, but unlike House you have a habit of pretending to be what people want. Perhaps we should have known that – _I_ should have known that – but you're very good at it and it's very hard to tell what it is genuine and what is not. Cameron made a good point: we all came to you as a friend because you were close to House in ways that none of us were, that he wouldn't _let_ any of us be, because you two understand each other better than any of the rest of us do. It's going to haunt us all wondering if, when we appealed to you for intervention, you helped House – or you hurt him."

"You _weren't _responsible for that." The words come in a choked rush, around a lump in his throat so large and spiky that Wilson can hardly breathe. "You _weren't_. Anything I ever did, it was _my_ fault. _I'm_ the one responsible for my actions—" He half-turns his head to include House in his conclusion. "Whatever the circumstances." He bites his lower lip, catches his breath and admits: "Cameron was right about that too."

"We're _all_ responsible," House retorts, his blue eyes challenging Cuddy to debate that. He answers Wilson's partial glance with his own. "And on balance you helped more than you hurt."

"That's not enough," Cuddy says quietly.

House shrugs; Wilson sighs.

"It's all we've got."

Cuddy presses her lips together before she sighs too. Stalemate. Above, something heavy drops to the floor with a dull _thunk._

"I think," she ventures at length, "that you should go home." Her eyes are not unkind as they light on Wilson, but they are determined. "I'd like to talk to House for a while and I'd like you not to be here when I leave."

House glares at her, counters instantly: "I don't want to talk to her and I don't want you to leave."

Wilson thumbs the back of his hand, his eyes closing for a moment as he imagines them alone as they were hours before, sated and sleepy and safer than he's felt in a long time. His skin shrinks with the loss as he slowly makes himself let go.

"It's fair," he says softly, reluctantly, and stands.

House gapes up at him, blue eyes widening.

"The hell it is."

Hoh, that _look._ That lost, deserted look that House gave him that drowning night on the porch and a dozen nights after when Wilson threw him out or drove off and left him wherever they'd been. He has to bite his lip, steel himself with the knowledge that he is not leaving House alone; he's leaving him in better company than he knows how to be.

"I have to go."

"Wilson!"

House plunges to his feet, stalks him toward the door. He barely stops himself rapping Wilson's knuckles when he stoops to snatch up his duffle bag. He doesn't even try to back off when their hands lock simultaneously around the door handle.

"I _have_ to," Wilson repeats, his vision threatening to fall apart again, but his conviction sound.

His shrink has warned him about this. People need time to forgive, to think about whether they even want to; it's not his right, just because he's trying to make amends; it might never happen and he will always have to earn it.

Disagreement is etched all over House's face. He shoves his cane out of the way against the wall and snags a handful of Wilson's borrowed t-shirt. His lips are forceful and dry, his breath heavily caffeinated.

"Call me," he orders, with a jerk of Wilson's shirt to punctuate it.

Wilson nods, forehead brushing House's.

"Tonight."

House doesn't let him go.

"See you again?"

His voice cracks; he's trying not to make it a question.

Wilson presses their lips together again, hating that the kiss tastes like goodbye.

"Soon."

House's mouth twists under his, as if he suspects that's a lie. Roughly, he lets go of the door and quite suddenly Wilson finds himself outside in the indifferent sunshine.

House's voice travels, faint but furious, through the open kitchen window.

"What the hell was that for?"

Cuddy sounds weary, though she can hardly have started.

"House—"

He must see something on her face, perhaps guesses in that penetratingly acute way of his at what drives her.

"Jealous, Lisa?"

The stung silence jolts the sidewalk under Wilson's feet. _So._ Wishing wholeheartedly he hadn't heard that, he forces himself to walk down the steps and cross the street to his car. This is not the moment for some supremely egotistical display of possessiveness. But X-rated imaginings writhe before his eyes all the way to the airport. It takes everything he has to check himself in at the terminal.

TBC…


	15. Chapter 15

**Part Twelve:**

The phone squalls far too many times. House shunts his hand up and down his twitching thigh, threatening to rub holes in the denim instead of tracks into the rug. He's on the brink of grabbing his wallet and his Repso and heading for the airport when the call connects.

"You left!" he snaps, by way of greeting.

On the other end of the line, Wilson sighs.

"It was the right thing to do, House."

House snarls under his breath and lurches to his feet, stomping his frustration at Cuddy, his paranoid pets, and Wilson's sanctimonious schtick into the faded carpet.

"Oh yeah. You're a real poster boy for doing the right thing!"

Wilson breathes in sharply. That tone always gets to him. Dry, denigrating, spiked with a shot of _you think too highly of yourself_. The one House learned from his father.

The one he'd promised to stop using...

Stomping a barefooted arc around the piano in the window alcove, House figures it doesn't matter. Not if Wilson's going to react like this, the way he always used to. Has he _not_ changed, after all? Over the unlevel thuds of his own footfalls House listens for the dial tone. When the going gets tough, Wilson _always_ packs his bags and goes as far away as possible. Letting the door smack House somewhere painful on his way out.

There's another intake of breath, this one steadier, before Wilson says:

"They need some space. _We_ need some space."

"Space is for astronauts!" House barks, disgusted to find himself being dictated on the same damn subjects Cuddy rambled through for nearly two hours after Wilson left. "You _left_, you son of a bitch! After you—"

He tries to bite on the tirade, he does, but he's taken a bellyful of faith healing quackery over the last few years and some of it's right and some of it's wrong and he's still not fucking happy, so screw it. Wilson is irritating and intoxicating and _interesting_. He'll take the puzzle and the punch in the nose that comes with it over bowling dates with the American-Ozzie perfect couple and boring-ass dinners with Cuddy any day. Riled beyond anything he can hope to contain, he explodes, careless and cruel.

"You know why I wouldn't let you get on your knees last night? You aren't man enough to take it! You're a damn coward, Wilson! You'll crawl for anyone! You crawled right out of the door like a kicked puppy!"

_Oh…fuck._

The click-clack of suitcase wheels, the indecipherable crackles of an announcement system and the wounded shriek of a small child linger for ten breaths, then twenty. Mouth dry, House wonders if there are enough numbers for Wilson to count to in order to cool him out after _that_ dig. Having stopped in his tracks, he takes a deep breath of his own and says honestly:

"I'm sorry. That was…I broke the pact."

The clatter-chatter cacophony of the airport swells, as though Wilson has taken the phone away from his ear. Dreading the dial tone – the old trick, call me back, grovel to me or a new self-preserving and final farewell – House repeats his partner's name, anxious, then sharp, demanding. There's a close cottony rustle as he's gagged with the chest of Wilson's t-shirt. _His_ t-shirt. House swears, strains for the sound of Wilson's heartbeat, hears only static.

Finally, the child's snivelling creeps in again. Then Wilson exhales audibly down the line, wets his lips.

"That hurt, House," he says in a strained voice. "That really fucking _hurt_."

"I didn't mean it."

These are old words, rote words once: half-truth, half-lie, relationship duct tape from the nearest cliché store. House wonders if they sound different now that he's got his heart behind them, bumping against his teeth as he awaits Wilson's response.

The second silence aches worse than a fracture.

House's anger is rapidly diluting, getting stirred in with guilt and panic, and he glares at the furniture surrounding him, sure it's creeping closer the longer he stands still. He can't let the quiet be, pesters it before it can scab over, needing to know what damage he's done.

"I just channelled both of our Frankensteins again, didn't I?"

"Yeah." Wilson takes another sequence of controlled breaths, mixes metaphors. "Yeah, that one was a bulls-eye."

The ambient noise drops, as though he's moved away from the concourse to a more secluded corner of a waiting area. Ever so faintly, House can make out the squeak of cloth on glass as he leans against a slanted terminal window, blue duffle at his feet, and stares out at the white-winged planes being lined up for boarding.

Feeling his own room open out again now that Wilson hasn't hung up, House weaves over to his piano and perches on the closed lid.

"What time's your flight?"

"I got one in a couple of hours."

"You could cancel it." He reaches for the bottle of bourbon that sits on a stolen bar coaster on the polished black top, pours out a measure into the dirty glass beside it. "Come back. Leave Sunday, like you planned."

Expected as it is, the answer burns worse than his mouthful of booze.

"No." A shuffle of hair as though Wilson is rubbing his forehead, habitually smoothing out frown lines, reshaping his expression as he tries to reshape his mood. "Better not, I think." He sounds part way between an apology and a reproach. "You and I, we need to be patient; let your friends take some time to regroup and adjust to this."

"There is no this." House's heart sinks back to where it should be, then lower still. He chugs another mouthful, cursing himself for a fool. "You said it yourself; this is a reset button. Status quo. They shouldn't _need_ to adjust. Nothing's changed."

"_You_ were right," Wilson counters. "We _need_ things to have changed. We need to be more patient with each other."

"Patient-smatient." They need to be _honest_ with each other. He's pulling his weight again and now Wilson's pulling out bullshit. "You're still pissed at me."

"You're still pushing me!" Wilson snaps. "Stop."

He is too. Has been from the second Wilson walked through the door. If he hadn't been, he'd've got shot of the liquor. He knows the man was drinking the first time he called him; that he's quit in the spirit of the pact they made, whilst House is screwing with it at every turn. Even so, he ricochets off the piano to stalk the room once more, all tilting strides and stressed struggles with apportioning responsibility.

"This is _not_ all my fault!" _Fuck_, he misses his Vicodin for taking the edges off the world. "_You_ ditched me – again! You just fucking walk out whenever it suits you. _You_ stop. I _asked_ you to stop." Amidst the anger there is petulance, a fragile veil for raw ancient fear. "And you left. You _left_ me!"

His voice drops to a miserable, sullen mutter.

"You promised you wouldn't. You _promised._"

"Oh, House."

House freezes in mid-stride. He colours and closes his eyes as Wilson realises what this is about. Every slammed door and hang-up, abandoning House the way his father did when he was angry, shutting him in the garden on a winter's night or leaving him alone in some remote area to find his own way home.

"Ohhhh." The insulted ire runs out in a sudden sigh. Wilson's tone changes to something so kind it should make House's teeth hurt instead of making him feel shaky with relief. "Oh, House; it's okay. I'm not leaving you. I'm going home for a few days, that's all. I _am_ coming back."

House bites the inside of his lip hard, doesn't speak until he knows he's got his voice under control. When he does, it's wry and pseudo-saccharine, a hasty deflection from the utter dependency he's just exposed.

"Awww. We just had our first fight. Ain't that romantic?" He ignores Wilson's somehow audible eye-roll. "Shame you're not here so we can have the wicked hot make-up sex. Hey! I know!"

So does Wilson. He hastily cuts him off.

"If you give me a hard-on in the middle of Newark airport," he warns. "I will not take responsibility for my actions."

House coughs up his next mouthful of drink. Wilson's voice comes quick and alarmed.

"Oh shit. Too soon?"

House wipes bourbon off his crumpled t-shirt with his sleeve, manages to chuckle again without choking. Leaving the glass unfinished, he stands and ambles over to the couch to settle in for an extended chat.

"No way," he assures his paranoid partner. "Welcome back."

TBC…


	16. Chapter 16

A small white projectile arcs out of the sky and _whacks_ to the ground inches from Wilson's open car door. He jolts back into his seat, bruises his knee on the steering column and stares as the object bounces wildly around the sparsely populated parking lot of Princeton Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. It boings off the door of a nearby Toyota and trundles back toward him along the tarmac. He stops it with his foot, ducks out carefully and picks it up. A golf ball. Black permanent marker is scrawled along one side of it.

_Welcome home!_

Suspicious, Wilson shields his face in preparation for further low flying greetings spheres and sweeps a look around the nearby lawn areas. Only one is occupied. Squinting into the lights from the hospital windows, he can make out the tiny orange glimmer and dusky pink scrubs of a nurse smoking a cigarette in the shadows beside the wall.

_Fssss!_ Another golf ball spins out of nowhere. Wilson snatches it from the air two inches from his face. The smack of it against his palm blazes outwards in a flush of pain. Mouthing a silent curse, he uncurls his throbbing fingers and finds another message.

_This is God._

A half-smile beginning on his face, he looks up. A dark silhouette stands on the roof of the hospital, leaning on a golf club. For a split-second, his stomach twists at the proximity of man to guttering and a long dark fall; then a hand is raised in a brief salute. Leaving his overnight bag on the backseat, Wilson locks his Volvo and heads for the fire escape.

He climbs up to a blazing aurora from the skylights and a few filched lamps that illuminate the chewing gum and cigarette-butt speckled roof where the janitors take breaks. Chase in chinos and a yellow polo shirt pauses in selecting a club from a communal bag to nod to him. A short man with a large nose squatting to align a ball near the edge waves a hand. Dr. Taub, Wilson thinks, the head of the new plastics department. If he can trust House's Pinocchio-esque comparisons, that is. No sign of Foreman, but the leggy secretive "hot bisexual" Hadley sits astride an upturned bucket that used to contain more balls than are lined up in front of her. She too dips her chin in greeting, her large eyes appraising. Someone has told her about him.

Her epithet-maker blocks her not-unfriendly examination.

"Hey."

House's chin is bristly, his breath slightly soured by a long unfinished day. Wilson's sure that his tastes of recycled air and synthetic peppermint, enjoys the contrast between the cool evening and the rough warmth of House's lips.

"Hey."

A golf club is inserted into his hand. Automatically, Wilson reaches for the golf balls he's pocketed and ambles over to join the others. Taub strikes his ball off into the dark shaggy depths of the campus trees. A faint _splosh_ identifies the lake. Taub punches the air and steps aside, sweeps a hand in a grandiose gesture to indicate Wilson should go next.

He pauses, glancing at House.

"Are we _aiming_ for whoever's down there or are we just hoping like hell that we miss?"

House snorts. "Anyone out in the grounds at this time of night is either parking and protected by daddy's car or lurking with illegal intent. World won't miss a few of those."

"And the homeless? Resident bench-snoozers?"

He's thinking of his brother.

House shakes his head. "Nah, soup kitchen's open tonight."

"Did you actually check all this out or are you just lying to me so that I'll shut up and hit the ball?"

A grin gets out before House can stop it.

Wilson sighs, shakes his head. Then he stoops, positions the ball, and casts around to check everyone is clear before taking his swing. One of the graffitied balls shoots off toward the moon, swoops like a falling star and disappears silently into the dark. Wilson smiles to himself, realises that if he'd thought to make a wish on it, he'd've wished for this.

Well, not this exactly. He'd never have thought of rooftop golf courses and accidental maybe manslaughter, especially in this bittersweet location where he'd used to work. But _this_: the loop of House's arms around his waist and the clunk of his chin into the groove of Wilson's clavicle. Silvering stubble rouses shivery patterns on his neck. He takes a shuddering breath, tensing slightly at the untoward PDA, figures House is putting on a show for someone. But the grumpily apologetic whisper in his ear is all for him.

"Cuddy stuck me with a case last minute. Cameron's been trolling the E.R all day. They got lucky."

She _is_ jealous. Lisa, that is. Wilson presses back against House's chest, lets the club fall to twist his arms backwards around the lean torso and hold on tight. She's here, all the time, where he can't be anymore. And House—

"Figure we can cut out for a couple of hours. Pizza place? Take-out?"

—isn't susceptible at all. Wilson bites his tongue to stem the bolt of heat that goes through him, faster, stronger, and way more localised than the kind of jealousy that used to run rampant through his veins every time House kept a hooker on speed-dial or worked his weird charisma on one of his colleagues.

Reminding himself that he's not good at letting House make decisions for them, that he has to start somewhere, even if it's small, he checks his desire and murmurs back:

"You pick."

He doesn't quite keep himself from hooking his fingers into the waistband of House's jeans and suggestively pressing his knuckles against the small of his partner's back where his blue shirt has ridden up.

House rumbles contentedly in his chest, nips the nape of Wilson's neck. While Wilson chews on a gasp, House straightens, circles away from the edge.

"Chase, you're captain of the capsized naval officer downstairs. No men to go OB and no keel-hauling from Cuddy when I get back."

Chase grins and snaps off a salute.

"Aye, aye, sir!"

Hadley opens her mouth. House mimes zipping it.

"I've got my cell," he pre-empts her. "You won't get another B&E charge trying to wake me up. Although if you do want to try out your mad cat-burgling skills again, wear a cat suit. There's some hot leather ones at—"

"Not a porn star dot com," Hadley counters, eyes sweeping the navy heavens.

Wilson bumps his shoulder into House's gently, nods to her, and heads for door that leads inside to the elevators.

* * *

The late night pizza parlour is bright and busy for ten p.m. on a Friday. Wilson keeps his disappointment to himself as he slides into a red plastic booth on one side of a fifties style bench table. House smirks at him over the menu.

"Figured you'd want to talk first," he lies, sliding one socked foot up Wilson's calf and rubbing lightly.

"Uh huh." Wilson layers on the sarcasm, takes a cooling sip from his water glass. "You're an ass."

Silvery eyebrows wiggle suggestively. His toes slide higher.

"Maybe later."

_Oh God, he_ wants. _But…_

House narrows blue eyes at him.

"You're not still—?"

Wilson avoids his scrutiny.

"You want to talk about _that_?"

"Large deep pan with everything – no anchovies." House addresses the waitress. "Two coffees." He jumps, as though his pager has just gone off, glances down at it. "Ah damn. To go."

When the redhead has bustled off, House leans across the table. A soft scuffling indicates that he's treading back into his sneakers.

"There was no _that_," he insists. "Quit it with the self-inflicted guilt trips. You've changed."

Wilson darts a doubtful glance at him.

"That wasn't what you yelled at me on the phone a few months back. You don't seem very sure either way."

House shrugs.

"I'm not always sure and neither are you. But that figures. Sometimes we've changed, sometimes we haven't. That's how it's going to be. We aren't the Stepford Wives. We're bound to piss each other off and push the wrong buttons occasionally. Doesn't mean we're going to wind up with one of us in the ground."

_Again_ lingers unsaid. He's found out that Wilson's heart stopped in the ambulance or he's thinking of his own stalling in the E.R. Is _almost_ dying enough to be sure they won't risk each other that badly again? Or is Wilson over-thinking every little detail of their relationship because he feels rushed into returning to Princeton, barely two months after he bailed at the apartment? Why is it that everything feels so much simpler when House comes to Chicago and they're hanging out in hotels or on the _Solace?_

"I just don't want to go there again," he says at last.

"'Zactly." House pops a handful of complimentary olives and chomps carelessly.

Wilson shakes his head.

"Does it mean anything to you that I never wanted to go there _before_? I loved you, House. Even when I hated you. I never wanted you dead. Mostly, I just wanted you to stop."

Under the table, House treads lightly on the toes of Wilson's loafers.

"We're going to fight," he says calmly. "We can't keep on hiding from the possibility at opposite ends of the phone or in pay-per-night hotels. Or," he stands and unhooks his pager from his belt, discreetly drops it under the table. "Giving a crap about what people think.

"Thanks," he adds to the returning waitress.

He switches a handful of cash for her bag of eats and saunters out toward the parking lot, cane in one hand, food in the other. Wilson catches up with him to hold open the exit door, guessing that they're heading for House's apartment after all.

"You just want to see Hadley in that cat suit," he suggests lightly.

House grins at him over his shoulder.

"You _don't?_"

* * *

Swilling his mouth out with peppermint wash to get the lingering taste of pizza and ejaculate off his teeth, Wilson flinches as something pointed nudges him beneath the left scapula. He glances up into the mirror, finds House in a bathrobe behind him, holding out a toothbrush. His cell peals for the umpteenth time in the background. House ignores it.

"I used the brush you left here to unblock the sink," he admits, though he's timed it carefully enough that it's possible Wilson's already used it again.

Luckily for him, he hasn't; that toothbrush is at least three years old and he's brought a fresh one in his overnight back. But he turns and takes the plastic apology with a shake of his head.

"You're a jerk."

"You love me," House asserts confidently.

Their eyes stay locked for too long to let that line be a throwaway.

Wilson remembers saying that himself too many times, finds himself thinking House's own ditto: _So much it hurts. _But the bitterness has gone, replaced by a hot-eyed, tight-chested, skin-tingling need. He doesn't nod, doesn't need to. He catches House's eye again in the mirror for a fleeting second of acknowledgement that it's too soon to put into words and concentrates on brushing his teeth. When he's done, instead of packing the brush back up with his wash things, he sets it carefully in the tooth-mug beside House's.

When he returns to the bedroom, House has gone back to the hospital. But waiting on his pillow in the rectangle of warm yellow light from the lamp, Wilson finds the _Welcome Home_ golf ball.

TBC…


	17. Chapter 17

**Part Fourteen:**

"I _hate_ dogs."

House studies the chewed remains of his toothbrush strewn across the terracotta bed-linen with a scowl. The snoring yellow lump that has wedged himself between them during the night ignores both him and the evidence of its crime.

"The metaphorical mutt isn't negotiable, House."

Wilson rubs his eyes and makes a vague attempt to swipe the forest of striped bristles and crumbs of blue plastic off the coverlet. Beyond his shoulder, beneath the gap between the sill and the ill-fitting muslin-thin tan roller blind, the window frames the dawn as it rouses Chicago: ribbons of brightening blue sky and tangerine-flecked swatches of cirro-stratus. Despite their suspiciously crunchy awakening, Wilson is quickly alert – and firm.

House glares at the dog, determinedly oblivious to its master's defence of it and the incoming morning. Shouldn't it need breakfast or to pee or something? His eyes light grimly on his mauled overnight bag, which has been thoroughly dug open and every item of clothing turned out onto the varnished floor. Scratch that thought. The damn dog's probably already pissed in his sneaker.

"This bed ain't big enough for the both of us," he growls.

Wilson pauses mid-stretch. Tension winches in the lines at the corners of his eyes, disturbs the languidness of his sleep-tousled sprawl.

"Don't make me choose," he murmurs.

The customary hunger pangs of early morning deepen into a chilly hollowness in House's belly. No longer warm inside their crumpled cocoon of covers, he appraises that warily. Guilt swarms in as Wilson smoothes a hand sadly down one of Hippo's silken ears. If pressed, he'll surrender his staunch canine companion for House: a man whose bark and bite can set the pair of them off into a to-the-death dogfight at the slightest provocation.

No longer wanting to be chosen, House gives the Labrador a reluctant peace-treaty of a rub to its scruff. Droopy lids lift briefly below a crinkly blond brow. Hippo parleys with a flat stare that says plainly if there's not enough room in this bed, House can have the basket in the kitchen. Then he goes back to sleep. Defeated in victory, House flops back amidst the pillows and mutters:

"You owe me a toothbrush."

Wilson's face relaxes.

"I'll take it out of his allowance," he kids. "C'mon."

He throws back the covers and holds out a hand to hoist House to his feet.

"There's a spare brush in the bathroom and we're going to be late if we don't get showered now."

House grabs Wilson's outstretched hand and lets himself be pulled upright, hopping to take the worst of his weight on his left leg. A spasm in his right thigh, stiff from a long energetic night and a lazy lie-in, makes him seize Wilson's shoulder. He bites his tongue through the pain that flushes hotly up to his hip and down to tingle in his toes, then uses the hasty grip to tug Wilson into a stale stubbly kiss.

Their joined hands brush against Wilson's hip. The skin is warm and a burgeoning hardness butts against the soft skin of House's wrist. He lets go of Wilson's fingers, slides his hand down and across, squeezes obligingly, shares the deep intake of air, swallows Wilson's startled _uh_. They're going to be late, whichever way. House grins into the suddenly urgent crush of Wilson's mouth against his. The trick is making sure his usually punctual partner doesn't care.

* * *

"It's not cancer."

Squinting at the scans tacked to the _Solace's _circular cabin windows, illuminated against the grey and mauve twilit sky by the bright gleam of the jetty lights, House punctuates his statement with a loud crunch of taco chips taken several moments before from the split blue packet splayed across the low cabin table.

"I know it's not cancer, _ace_." Wilson clonks him lightly on the back of the head with a freshly opened beer bottle and passes it over his shoulder when House reaches absently back. "What _is_ it?"

_Good question. Shame he doesn't have an answer…yet._

House swivels around on the bench, leaving the scans fixed to the portholes behind him, to ponder. They'd covered patient history on the drive out to the baseball stadium, current blood-work as Wilson was paying the one of the ambling vendors for hot-dogs and gargantuan tubs of soda, lidded, the kind with straws that never reach the bottom. Patient X had been forgotten in the storm of cheers, chants and Mexican waves, the signed baseball that Wilson magically produced after a faked visit to the little boys room after the game, and an introduction to an ex-patient's husband – the freaking starter for the White Sox. Differential resumed on the drive from the stadium to the waterfront. Now, lounging uncomfortably on the unyielding box-benches-cum-bunks in the _Solace's_ narrow lamp-lit cabin, House leafs through the pilfered patient file.

"The patient was a case passed to you by your predecessor, a sixty-five year old woman who came routine check-up for after a radical mastectomy four years previous," he clarifies, reviewing their previous discussion as he rummages through the crabbed jottings of George Gibbs, M.D. and Wilson's neatly curling additions to the file.

Wilson nods, returning to the _Solace's_ little refrigerator in the storage-area slash kitchenette at the other end of the cabin to source a drink for himself.

"Yeah," he squats briefly in a little rectangle of yellow light, looking over the edge of the open white door between the tiny stove and one of the cupboards. "She'd been treated with adjuvant chemotherapy of cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, and fluorouracil (CMF) without radiation therapy. Then daily doses of tamoxifen, returning her to fitness and a previous activity level of around sixty minutes aerobic exercise a day. Now her lung function is compromised."

He selects a soda, a few beer bottles chinking musically as he eases it out of the well-stocked shelf and stands, nudging the door closed with a knee. He opens the screw cap, careful of the rapid effervescence within the sculpted sides of the bottle, tosses the lid into the trash and returns to the seats.

"When she came in, she complained of dyspnea from a five minute walk from the bus stop – apparently an increasingly regular occurrence – and admitted that in the last four months she'd developed a non-productive cough. I did a basic work-up and chest radiography revealed that, in addition to apparently incidental pleural thickening found on the first set of images taken after the breast adenocarcinoma was discovered, a new right pleural effusion and progressive pleural thickening has developed, worse in the left lung than the right. The pleural fluid was negative for malignancy."

With a puzzled shrug, he plops onto the bench opposite House and frowns at him across the low cabin table.

"There are no symptoms of her cancer returning, but obviously she's concerned and in need of investigative work-up."

"Not by an oncologist. Why are you still on this case again?"

Wilson swigs his soda, leans back into a convenient corner made by the back of the opposite bench and the side of a cabinet, stretches his legs out so that he can prop his sneaker heels on the table and shrugs.

"Chicago Grace can be a little old school. We don't have a Diagnostics department. Any diagnostic work has to be out-sourced. The Dean prefers direct referrals to—" a _not-my-choice-of-words_ grimace forewarns House of the forthcoming familiar insult before Wilson continues, "glorified general practice. Either I stay on the case, triple-checking it's not cancer or I have to ship it around for someone else to have a guess at. And I don't know where to send it yet."

"Send it to me."

Wilson pauses mid-slurp of cola. The aborted action doesn't quite work and some of the sticky dark fluid makes it down his throat, but a trickle sploshes down his chin and the rest backwashes into the bottle. House flashes him an amused look and Wilson wipes his mouth hastily on his wrist. He shifts his feet to the floor and sets the drink atop the laminated map of Lake Michigan affixed to the tabletop.

"You're serious?"

House flips the file closed, slings it onto the map too and shrugs in turn, sipping beer.

"Welcome back to the world of Weird and Wonderful M.D. It's what I do."

Wilson quirks him an equally amused look.

"It's what you're _supposed_ to do. What you do is watch re-runs of overly dramatised medical shows."

House hooks his eyebrow pointedly at his on-again, off-again partner.

"Because _our_ life has never been a surgical soap-opera."

"No way – we're consultants."

House snickers and Wilson reaches for his cell.

"Thanks. I'll put in the call."

"Great."

Habit puts the beer aside on a nearby bookshelf and has House reaching for his cane. But, as his fingers close on the arch of the handle, Wilson suddenly grabs the other end. House starts, heart flipping violently into his throat. _No. No!_ _What's happened? Why? Things were fine a split-second ago!_ He clutches his cane tighter, afraid to let go. The scent of hops grows strong as he imagines his beer bottle shattering and the cabin's kitschy electric lanterns swinging wildly, struck repeatedly on the apex of a multitude of blows. The air seems to whistle and hum with the sweeps of the wooden shaft. It takes him several seconds to realise that, no, that's just his ears and the lights aren't moving either, it's his vision distorting as panic makes the cabin spin. He focuses hard and it processes that Wilson isn't about to snatch the stick off him, that he's simply holding on. No reassurance comes of it, though, because a strange little smile plays on his partner's lips. Slowly, deliberately, he rises and moves to bar the gap between House and the cabin door.

"No," he corrects himself. "I won't. Not right now."

_Why?_ Why? _WHY?_ _What's going on?_ House stares at him, cants his head unconsciously in a slow-motion duck. Wilson's smile widens, growing wicked, a lot too like a grin for his predatory movements.

"If I call," Wilson goes on, almost drawling with something that sounds oddly akin to amusement. "You'll be on your feet and out of here on the next plane. I know you. Mrs. Hummel isn't dying in the next thirty-six hours."

House licks dry lips, realises with a jolt where this is going.

"No?" he ventures, somewhat hoarsely. "Got something more interesting in mind for that time?"

Wilson tugs gently, uses the cane to tow House to his feet, all but into the same space he occupies, as far as physical laws allow. Fingers still flexing nervously on the handle, House nonetheless finds he can breathe again – quick and shallow now, stood so close that he can feel the pouch of Wilson's hoody skim the buttons of his shirt every time one of them exhales.

"Nah," Wilson murmurs, his breath buffeting teasingly against House's chin. "Have you?"

_Of course Wilson hadn't been planning to hurt him!_ House should've known better. Wilson is better. _He_ is better. Mostly. Enough.

Annoyed at the unreasonable resurgence of paranoia, he manufactures a briefly speculative expression that makes Wilson chuckle, then snags a handful of grey sweater sleeve and yanks his partner forward into a rough, relieved kiss. Wilson's soft _mm_ as their lips bump, hot and hard, affirms he's rightly guessed the game and the last rattle of adrenaline casts caution into the lake outside. _Hang-ups be damned! Every last bruise was worth_ this _anyway._ House lets go of his cane and Wilson tosses it carelessly onto the bench behind them. They surge against one another like the swell of a cheer through a crowd.

Wilson's hands seize the front of his shirt, pull him backward toward the opposite bench, overturning the forgotten bottle of cola as they stumble over the table. He falls backward onto the bench, yanking House down after him. House lands on his knees, legs either side of Wilson, and yelps as the concussion of crashing onto what amounts to a narrow wooden box covered in a yoga mat jars up through his ruined thigh.

"_Fuck,_" he spits, rocking to the left and ramming his shoulder into one of the starboard portholes. "Ow! Seriously, _fuck._"

"Or not," Wilson agrees, wincing, rubbing the back of his head where it struck the edge of the cabinet acting as a footboard to the bunk.

"_Un_fuck," House corrects, scowling at the bony contraption that only a hardtack-and-maggot-eating, keel-hauling, plank-walking, sailor could call a bed. "Not here."

He struggles upright, grasps Wilson by the wrist and pulls him toward the cabin door.

"Outside."

"Uh, no." Wilson's eyes go wide and he snares House's wrist in turn, twisting his hand over to dig his fingertips in between House's radius and ulna restrainingly. "We're in the harbour this time and there's at least two dozen college kids having a party three boats down, can't you hear them?"

He reaches for the cabin door, chinks it, and a lively roar of karaoke, tinkling bottles and uninhibitedly loud conversation crowds in around them.

"Besides," Wilson's teeth chatter in the stiff spring draught that follows suit. "It's bitter out there. There's a couple of months yet before the weather changes for the summer."

"Shit," House mutters, pushing the door closed and Wilson into it for a probing, hungry kiss that makes his partner shiver, no longer with cold but an anticipatory thrill of need. "Get your car keys."

The fifteen-minute drive to Wilson's apartment takes five.

* * *

They hit the bed in a deliciously messy tangle of lips and limbs. House wrenches Wilson's hoody over his head, jerks impatiently at his belt. Between bruising kisses, he bites out:

"C'mon, c'mon."

A brief one-sided tussle forces Wilson between his legs. House traps him in place with his knees, hoops his left leg heavily over Wilson's sacrum, and growls:

"No more holding back."

It's absurd, this, Wilson's aversion to a full consummation of _them_. It's a high-schoolers' and shrink's safety-play of not quite readiness that invests an act with the substance of a relationship that unstoppably _is_, ready or not. House is too old for parking and heavy-petting, too young to settle for coffee and companionship, he wants, _needs_, and he's having– _now_. No more stalling. His arousal, his urgency, is so thick it rolls over him like a second layer of skin, his sweat through his clothes plastering them together.

Wilson's hands shake, not nerves but fraying control, as he paws at House's shirt, latching onto the buttons, pushing them open frustratingly one by one. House swears, gets his hands in the cotton tangle and tears, threads popping, buttons pinging around them, before Wilson takes over, wrestles with the blue barricade, shoves it off his shoulders. His fingers tangle in the cotton of House's t-shirt too, contort it into a black cotton helix, fumble it up past his ears and off.

House dashes a hand up into Wilson's hair, mashes their lips together, wet and wonderfully careless. Wilson's breaths come in tremulous drags through his nose and he heaves his mouth away to suck a hot possessive trail down House's throat; a familiar tremble through his torso, writhing and pushing against House's own, is triggered by the stinging burn of stubble against his lips.

House snatches at the hem of Wilson's polo shirt. The apple-green cotton clings to his calloused fingertips; he fights it for the hot sleek skin below, the excited flinch of Wilson's stomach, and his partner's jagged intake of breath. He can't tell what entices him more, Wilson's long-standing hyper-sensitivity that always makes him gasp like every touch is the first or the well-practiced iron control that ripples in his muscles, steadies his grip on House's belt, sliding it open as he rocks his hips forward without a glance, _there_, perfect alignment, grinding and goading House's lethargic cock to bolt into life, leap to catch up with the desire thundering through his body.

He snaps at the nearest ear, sucks Wilson's lobe between his lips, squeezing down on his partner's c-spine with his broad palm in a half-forgotten grab at dominance that drops Wilson's forehead suddenly onto his shoulder, a fleeting hiatus of submission, awaiting request. He could always do this, before, take charge in bed, command an apology or an experiment that would earn him a blink of surprise that anyone would want that, try that, who wasn't in a blue movie. He uses it, reckless, relentless, one hand grappling Wilson into listening, the other raking back and forth to catalogue in burning Braille the swell of his right nipple, the flickering spasms of anticipation tearing through the soft paunch of his belly, and the roiling arc of his sacrum. Wilson bucks harder against him as he clenches, _squeezes_, the plump flesh beneath the ass of blue jeans. With another nip to his partner's captive ear, House mouths a string of syncopated demands that ends in _fuck me!_

Does Wilson nod or breathe or groan it? Or is it some stereophonic telepathy that answers him: _all right, all right._ Heedless, it's _his_ way, and that's all he cares about, House snatches at the belt-loops of Wilson's jeans, jerks hard enough to shuck them down without opening them, leave knuckle-prints the soft gulley of Wilson's iliac region. Wilson scrabbles beneath himself, clawing House's zipper open, fighting his jeans down to half-mast, half-lugging him over onto his belly. House arches up beneath him, back straining like a strung bow, and _god, _what he wouldn't give for Wilson to just spit onto his hand.

But Wilson's grappling with his own pants again now, kicking his way out of them, groping in the dresser for synthetic slick and a sheath and House throws him a furious look over his shoulder, livid with impatience. Knelt over him, his weight and one palm slapped against House's lumbar group pinning him gloriously in place, Wilson suddenly baulks. His eyes go white at the edges. An ancient shot of adrenaline has House shaping the word _no_. Then, in total synchronicity, they tumble back in time.

* * *

_"You son of a bitch! You_ _son_ _of a BITCH!"_

_The apartment door flew open in House's face the second he unsnapped the lock. Wilson barged over the threshold, wild and wind-blown. His sweater and jeans were the same ones he'd worn the previous night. His hair fell forward in greasy disarray where his fingers had left off raking it. Strands stuck to his face, which was blotchy and puffy. Shadows bulged beneath his red-rimmed eyes. Every word came with a slurped back gag on phlegm and tears._

_"You _son_ of a _bitch_!"_

_The heels of Wilson's hands hit him two-square in the chest, branded bruises onto his flesh, gummed his stained shirt to his pale, clammy skin._

_"You could've DIED. You could've fucking died! And then—" _

_Wilson's driving steps stalled inches from the sofa, from the table he'd leapt over in his panic last night, from the lingering wet splotch on the carpet where House had just finished scrubbing out his own puke, working the stains out of the broadloom as he worked off the shakes of being slapped upside the head by sobriety._

_"And then I— It would've been—You would've died because I—because _you_—"_

_Wilson's fingers fisted in his shirt, jerked him all but off his feet, forced him so close that his partner's rank breath heaved against his lips. The grip popped buttons off his shirt as Wilson started to shunt him back, then hauled him in and shook, shook him so hard his teeth clanked together and he tasted blood on his tongue. _

_"You BASTARD. You _bastard. You_ got yourself into this, House. You get yourself into these _things_, things that I-I don't know how – or-or _why _– and then…" _

_The next jolt was vicious enough that the room jumped out of focus, a sudden _snick_ in his c-spine foreboding whiplash. _

_"I wrote you your damn prescriptions – I wrote you so many that the first good look…! I compromised my license, _knowing_ you're addicted, trying to stop you _hurting_ until you'll get yourself some _help_ – and-and you steal my prescription pad?"_

_The sanctimonious stammering was too much to handle on an empty stomach. House yanked his hands up and slammed them into Wilson's sternum._

_"You stopped!" he accused, as harshly as he could, though truth told he was still wrung-out from spewing and more than a little shell-shocked to find that the world was still as it was, where it was, in spite of thirty-six oxycodone drowned in a litre of strong liquor._

_"It was going to kil—" Wilson swore, teeth snapping shut abortively, unable to say what had come so close – so damn close – and yet so far from happening here last night. "House, I—"_

_"Yeah. _You._" The constant jostling stirred up the avalanche of anger and despair that had driven him first to indifference and then to seek oblivion and House bunted him back a few steps. But his nerve faltered at the hunted, horrified understanding in Wilson's eyes – too cruel to affirm. "Fat lot _you_ care, leaving me here to live or die on chance. You _left_. You found me unconscious and you walked out!"_

_"You puked," Wilson shot back, unsteadily. "_You_ were fine."_

_The inflection – unintentionally as it was – didn't escape House. He heard in it the fear, the disbelief, and the desperation that had birthed this one of Wilson's rages, knew his partner had been circling the block ever since, dialling his number but hanging up without pressing call, checking in at the window, coming to the door over and over before he finally dinned his tattoo onto it seventeen minutes ago. _

_But making sure House wasn't dead didn't mean he was going to be fine. Total opposite in fact._

_"Fine?" House let out a bark of laughter. "I'm _fine_? I'm going to fucking _jail_, Jimmy!"_

_"No." _

_Wilson waved his head from side to side, angry and adamant and idiotically naïve in his surety that stuffing a thermometer up a cop's ass and abandoning it there because the guy was a dick during a crotch rot check up wasn't going to have whatever trumped up repercussions the bastard could concoct._

_"No. I got you a deal. You do three months in rehab, stay clean for a year, and that's it. The DUI charge is dropped, no further investigation into your conduct. Detective Tritter gave his word."_

_"You took the word of a damn narco cop?" _

_After a long sub-career having run-ins with the law over his addictions and his extreme but effective diagnostic methods, House could hardly believe Wilson could be so trusting. He'd watched waaaay too many Hollywood cop-shows. Bullies with badges, that was all the bacon-smell heralded. There were shows about fair-minded cops because they were rare enough to be big damn news. Good, peace-keeping, law-abiding cops were the exception not the rule. Half of them were worse crooks than the ones modelling the latest design in pumpkin suits and handcuffs._

_"You're a moron!" he bellowed, as if yelling would din it through Wilson's soft heart and softer head. "It was a ploy! He bagged your confession when you decided to drop me in it for nabbing your scripts. They found six hundred pills in this place – no court is going to understand I'm not goddamn dealing them! Tritter's going to have me tossed in a hole to rot."_

_Wilson blanched, growing defensive. "I had to own up! He had evidence enough to take us _both_ down for dealing and maybe the hospital too! I told you, I made a bargain before I said a word—"_

_"In front of a lawyer? Recorded on tape in an interrogation room? Or in some storage closet or car seat, without witnesses, on hospital grounds?"_

_Wilson's flush attested to the latter and House's scathing nasal trumpet sent the red from his cheeks all the way to the tips of his hears._

_"He won't go back on it—"_

_"What the hell would you know?" House roared, punting Wilson in the chest so hard the last of his partner's breath exploded out in an agonised grunt. The retaliatory double-handed punch to his chest sent him staggering._

_"Why the hell would you rather go to jail than to rehab?"_

_"I wouldn't!" House snarled and, before he could stop himself, he looked at the spot on the carpet._

_WHAM! The ragged wet patch swelled into hyper-focus. His cheek smashed against the broadloom, House spat blood onto the stain a split-second before Wilson's weight walloped down on top of him, crushing him into the dusty carpet, which stank of vomit and disinfectant, spilt Jack and a whole fraternity of other whiskeys that he'd chugged back last night. _

_"Why?" Wilson snagged him by the throat, clutching him and rattling him and half-throttling him in a savagely terrified embrace. "Why? Why, House? Why is this the only thing that matters to you? Your next high!"_

_House thrashed in his grip, kicking and cramping under his partner's bulk. _

_"Get off, you ass! You're hurting me. Hurting my leg."_

_Wilson rammed his fist into the floor beside House's face, refused to move._

_"You should've cut the damn thing off!"_

_Hissing through the spasms of amplifying pain, House struggled and snarked back: _

_"You're all for cutting things off, aren't you? Legs, pills, oxygen!"_

_Wilson half loosened his hold, seized House by a handful of hair instead and hauled his face up to his own. _

_"I love you!" he hollered, looking more like he hated him. "And I don't _care_ what it takes to keep you alive!"_

_Love and loathing tore up his face into a stricken no-man's land of unreturnable emotion that House felt and didn't know how to feel. In the limbo betwixt the two, laughter built like a wire-topped wall._

_"Funny. Since it was you and your deal that made me figure I'd be better off dead." _

_There was a faint whistle and a burst of white. In a far off fashion, it dawned on House that Wilson had just hit him so hard that, for an instant, all further light and sound ceased. His own lie, that little grey fib that there had been anything logical beyond total resistance to a life trapped in pain and other people's perceptions and indifference to whatever might be the alternative, had won him the repercussion he knew he deserved. When the numbness broke, the shocking burst of white-hot, bone-deep, surface scalding, throbbing agony that engulfed one side of his face probably didn't even come close to what it was he had just made Wilson feel, inside. _

_A small strangled noise erupted from Wilson's throat and he rocked back onto his knees. For a split-second he was suspended between another strike and starting to his feet. Then one of them – House never knew which – moved and they smashed back together, hard hands in each other's hair, chins and teeth clashing in biting kisses. Amidst the remnants of House's overdose fighting became fucking._

_Seams rent and superficial layers of skin curled up under Wilson's nails as he literally tore House's liquor-spattered shirt open, delved beneath it for the button on his jeans. A clumsy grab woke his cock, which bucked against his boxers as if daring Wilson to try that again, harder. He did – button forgotten – and House reacted so sharply that he had to bring his knee up and ram it into Wilson's ribs, bowl them over, to stop him doing it again, stop him _not_ doing it again. Jerking his head to one side, out of the kiss, he bit down bruisingly on Wilson's carotid, half-pinning his partner beneath him and ground his hips down, crushing cocks into layers of clothing, into contact. _

_Wilson made a stifled sound, equal parts pain, resistance and involuntary reaction, before, fists already bundled against House's torso, he pushed one hard into House's gut. _Bastard._ Forced to arch his back, House swore silently as he was spilled onto his side, wrenching his right leg back out of harm's way. Wilson seized the advantage, rolling on top of him to grind his left thigh against House's zipper while their hands squabbled for each other's wrists, each striving to cuff the other's down. _

_The bite stood out scarlet and wet with saliva, eight perfect indents of House's canines and incisors framing it against Wilson's tanned throat. House's cock kicked in his pants at the thought of biting him again, of holding Wilson down, of thrusting not just against him but _into_ him… He snaked his arms out of the tangle with Wilson's and grabbed two good fistfuls of his ass._

_No._ No! Why can't you just _not_—?

_Did Wilson say it or did he engrave it into House's body with a violent wrench of his torso and the clamp of his hands over House's forearms to stop him? That old ingrained refusal of switching places that House didn't understand – who_ cared _what his father thought? How could he _know_ he wouldn't like it?_ _– and didn't try. He writhed, searching for an opening for another attempt. If Wilson didn't like it, tough, maybe he should just suck it up. After all, House fucking hated what had been happening to him and _he _was stuck with it._

_Some glitter of threat and challenge must've show in his eyes, because Wilson forced him down harder, barred House's right calf to the carpet with a well-place shin against shin, knee nuzzling at his groin, and all but sat on House's left thigh, castrating any chance of being topped himself in its tracks. Rearing above him, Wilson got a hold of House's waistband and yanked in short bursts, shimmied his jeans and boxers down over too lean hips, a serpentine shaking of him that suddenly reminded House of his emaciation, of how his bones butted against his skin, of how he'd stripped himself down to lean muscle and skeleton skipping meals that Wilson didn't buy and avoiding Wilson to make dates with his pills instead. _

_There was a flinch on Wilson's face and he half-closed his eyes as his fingers stabbingly charted the outlines of House's body, like a professor indicating the diagrammatic lines of limbs and layers beneath flesh and skin on a cadaver and still hating it, wishing for retirement, yet fixated, compelled, to try to teach. His touch lightened, became so gentle it hurt and House slapped at him, hard, to make him kiss him again, more teeth than tongue and snatch at his cock, grope at him as savagely as he had before. _

_But Wilson's hands were quaking now, a terrible struggle for control contracting his muscles and tendons, as he grasped House's hips, held on through his reactive lurch and turned him, pressed him face down into the wet phantoms of his attempt to finish himself off. His fingers were forceful, skilful, digging deep into House's clenched back muscles, clamping him against the carpet as he dragged his palms over House's bare skin, preventing every furious buck and struggle, yet finding all those pressure points that made him growl and groan and bite into the forearm he had thrown up to keep himself from crunching carpet fibres off the floor._

_House found himself yielding without meaning to, letting Wilson's potent brutality become bruising pedagogy, reminding him in a surge of pure endorphins that biology was more than a match for synthetic toxins. That, once, it hadn't mattered that he didn't know what happy meant, because everything was interesting and challenging and his own body was a chemical rollercoaster that he could ride at will. That now, he took refuge from being unable to run and fuck and, hell, dance until his skin burned and his blood sang and he was laughing inside his skin, out of his head, all heart and wild high, by burying himself in a boring routine dictated by pills and potions, struggling to find anything that would break the numb monotony, finding only fingerholds in imponderable puzzles and this hurricane-meets-volcano daily cataclysm he could set off between him and his Wilson._

_Weak from puking, struggling even to struggle now, his spine softening under Wilson's grinding, gruelling, _god-so-good_ massage, a tsunami of helplessness swamped House and he realised that he'd let his own arrogance bring him to his knees before the law, his lover, himself. He heard Wilson spit hard, then his fingers slid into House's crack, touched him, made him shiver, sensitive, sensitised to his own stupidity and the overwhelming, exhausting, unbearable uphill pilgrimage that it would take to get him out of this situation._

_And he just couldn't – wouldn't – allow Wilson to be the one to set him straight. Not when the son of a bitch had just pulled a jailhouse bartering stunt to get him there and, hell, get his own car back and his accounts unfrozen because he was too much of a coward to stand on principle that a dirty cop shouldn't have the right to exploit drug-addicted doctors any more than he, House, should have been screwing with either of their licenses the way he had been. No. Fuck that. If he had to fix it, he'd fix it his way, not Wilson's. He'd lost his ability to walk the last time he let anyone get his guard down, get too close. _

_Wilson sidled against him, oblivious, the plump slick head of his cock pushing at House's anus, pressuring him to give in, to admit that somehow, somewhere amidst their screwed up relationship of secrets and felony, he'd remembered why he _liked_ to live, that his real addiction was to love, to intrigue, to anything inexplicable . House was a split-second away from surrendering when he snapped:_

_"Stop!"_

_Wilson stilled, holding himself there – god, so close – hovering, and it took everything House had to dig his nails into his palms and order:_

_"Get off me."_

_He didn't want Wilson to, not really, he _wanted _to just give up, to let Wilson show him, love him, make love to him and remind him what it was like to get high on that instead. But he couldn't. Because there was an if in his mind: what if his body let him down, taunted him with the memory that once he could feel that good and now…now he'd broken himself too badly to be able to soar on primal passion and natural chemistry? _

_Teeth clenched, he gritted out again: "Wilson, _stop._"_

Don't do this. Don't prove me wrong. Don't be right. Don't make me wish I hadn't done this. Don't do that to me. Don't love me. Hate me. Let me hate you_. _

_Growing desperate, House flung a look over his shoulder, trapped and trembling and terrified by what it would mean if Wilson went through with this, forced him to feel what he knew, believed in it – or if that belief was torn apart by chemical dependence, impotence and strung-out nauseated weariness. His hands were free, but for some reason, House couldn't move, couldn't forced the cessation. His lower legs were noosed together by his jeans, his thigh spasmed into uselessness and the rest of his body paralysed in realisation. Wilson stared down at him, his dark eyes glittering with too little sleep, too many tears, and too much that he couldn't do to help and, suddenly, it gleamed in them that this was the moment he'd been waiting for: that there was nothing now, absolutely nothing, that House could do except give in. _

_That shard of certainty slammed into House, struck him so deep in the core that the world turned furry and all the colours swam. He heard Wilson's zipper _crrk_ and, forgetting that it had already been undone, the sound punched all the breath out of his body. It didn't occur to him that this was going to hurt inside and out. Only that if he were torn up by this he'd have to go to the E.R. and then their secret – not only his failures but Wilson's fists – would be loose and dangerous and so much more destructive than any cop could be. That it was safer, much safer for Wilson if, whatever the outcome, their violent reality stayed confined between these battle-scarred walls of the apartment. Knowing he couldn't let his partner take a fall too – however much it might or might not be deserved – House abruptly called off the war. Cramming his eyelids shut, he slackened every muscle as much as he could and bore down with his pelvic muscles to minimise the damage inside. _

_The forced release of tension fell away so much like a weight that it took him several moments to realise that Wilson's weight was gone too. The scramble of clothes as Wilson staggered to his feet, shoving himself back into his jeans, and stumbled away was nothing more than a cotton cacophony interspersed with the croak of cricked bones and a great cough of horrified breath spilling out. Then the door slammed and the apartment shuddered as Wilson's fist struck the wall outside the lounge once, twice, a third time several feet down, and a fourth further still. Then the bathroom door howled into its frame. _

_His body throbbing, a crowd of hollering aches from bruises, punches, undefeated arousal, shock, realisation, and interrupted coitus, House rolled over in a daze, struggled up onto his elbows. The sudden detonation of Wilson's fist against the bathroom mirror knocked him back to lie prone on the rug amidst the distantly tinkling tumult of a shattered – shattering – reflection. _

_Imagining the disintegration of his partner's glass-cast features beneath a self-flagellatingly punitive fist, the symbolism of the act struck House to the core. His lips parted in a soft, shame-filled, sound of surprise. _

_What the _hell _was going on here?_

_For the first time, it occurred to him that Wilson's cataclysmic rages might have nothing to do what he was doing to his partner at all._

* * *

"Wilson, what—?"

Caught up in his recollection, House starts to speak as if he has done as he should have done back then and gone to the bathroom to diagnose what it was that was really happening between them. Why Wilson sometimes stopped and sometimes could and sometimes couldn't, sometimes hurt House and yet, it seemed, meant only to hurt himself. But, as he would no doubt have done then himself, Wilson lurches away, an appalled denial stuttering out of him:

"No. No. No, no, no!"

He scrambles from the bed, tripping in his half-mast boxers that didn't quite come off with his jeans. He grabs the latter from the floor, his belt crackling hard against his thigh. The buckle bites into his skin, singing so loud that House's ears start to ring. Nausea thrums in his throat, but he knows it's not in his alone. Wilson staggers as he steps on a discarded shoe, hardly pausing in his blind lunge for the door, and then he's gone, hurling himself out into the unlit corridor. The anticipated echo of the past replaying itself drowns out the reality of the shaving mirror, balanced on a set of moving boxes in the bathroom, toppling as the door slam rattles the thin walls.

* * *

"Wilson."

Clothes discarded, his partner's dressing robe knotted around him, House follows Wilson's flight path to the lounge. The room is dim, grey-green in the smoggy sulphuric spring evening haze that swaddles the skyscrapers. Wilson is hunched up on the couch, jeans back on, his belt securely fastened, and a white tank top scrounged from a basket of ironed linen awaiting storage atop a parcel-taped box. His head is buried in both hands. He huddles in on himself as House hobbles across to perch on the orange yard-sale monstrosity of a sofa that came amongst the partial, indeed _only,_ furnishings he has. The lingering boxes that House had come to see as quirky cardboard furniture remind him that Wilson has, without knowing it, stalled in his recovery. Doubting himself too much to move forward, he's got himself stuck renting another little piece of limbo, waiting for the next cause to bolt.

Dry-mouthed with dread that this – _they_ – might end over something that in its action, if not its meaning, turned out to be so schematically insignificant, House reaches out to lay a hand on Wilson's shoulder.

"Easy," he murmurs, tucking his fingers under the broad strap of Wilson's top and resisting the flinch of sweat-moistened skin below. Then, subconsciously echoing the affirmation of trust he thought he'd heard earlier: "It's all right."

Wilson hunkers down further into his hands, resists House's attempt to tow him into a tighter net of both arms and a leg, if it'll make him stay. House takes a broader grip on Wilson's shoulder, squeezes soothingly.

"It's _all right._"

A single stubborn shake of the bent head.

"It's not." Soft that comes and hollow too. "It never can be. There're a lot of things I did that I'm always going to find it hard to come to terms with. But _this_?"

Scathing that. So scathing that House's eyebrows rise, his mouth curving in an involuntary, inappropriate, tilt toward disbelief, amusement.

_Oh, surely not?_

It's too ironic. His frank admission of his own suicidal tendencies on the yacht have Wilson half-ready to allow that House was himself complicit in the night he was beaten into bloody oblivion. That, whilst neither one of them should ever forget – as if they could – the potential risk that it could again happen, they can maybe both forgive him, one day. And yet this…

"I don't know how I can ever, _ever_, even _try_ to make peace with myself for—"

"A thing you _didn't_ do?"

House doesn't try to keep the lightness out of his voice. It's that or tightness. Wilson's panic is contagious and his whole body is tying itself in knots as if that, somehow, will hold Wilson down, make sure that, even if he can't make peace, he can't _leave._ House tightens his grip further, shakes gently in the hope of loosening the sense that's got itself stuck somewhere behind Wilson's stifled hysteria.

"Nothing happened." _Jesus, this is bad._ Without thinking the half-jest, all serious, nickname for Wilson that he's always kept inside his own head falls off his tongue: "Relax, Jiminy-Cricket, it's okay."

Wilson hardly seems to hear him. He lowers trembling hands.

"You don't get it," he says thickly, eyes wet. "That was…that was the _only_ time that I ever _wanted_ to hurt you. The others, I…mostly I just wanted you to stop threatening me, stop yelling at me, stop…whatever. That time, I—I wanted you to _suffer_."

"The way that you were, you mean?"

Wilson gargles a sound that might be the most humourless laugh House has ever heard.

"You alreadywere."

House rolls his eyes, sweeps his hand in gentle circles over Wilson's stiffly set scapula.

"No, I wasn't," he dismisses. "I was being a self-pitying, drug-addicted ass. My leg hurts like hell, Wilson, every day, some worse than others. It hurts on this half-cocked cocktail of OTCs, sleeping pills and anti-depressants I'm taking now. It hurt on Vicodin too so I won't bullshit you that I was doing it for anything much other than the high. I did the oxy because I didn't care how much I hurt myself anymore – or you. I was a fucking mess, Wilson, and I couldn't see a way out because I didn't want to take any of the ways that there were. It's not just my leg that's a mess. I can admit that now. My head's a mess too. Back then, depression was screwing over my judgement as much as the nerve damage in my thigh. Neither kind of pain lets me think straight."

He shrugs, self-consciously trying to resettle the burden of bearing his own guilt. Wilson shakes his head bitterly.

"Yeah, well, I was thinking okay and I tried to rape you."

His lip curls silently around the word, teeth showing in self-disgust.

"No." House strokes his way up to the back of Wilson's neck and seizes it lightly, thumb smoothing the bounding pulse in his carotid. "No. I was there, remember? I was with you the whole way, until I said stop. And then you did."

Wilson twitches under his touch. "I almost didn't."

"But you _did._"

"I didn't _want_ to. I think I _wanted_... I-I don't know—"

He seems to think he does, that he simply can't hear himself say it again, but there's such confusion in his dark eyes, such honest horror and self-hatred on his face, that House doubts that there's any cause to believe a split-second hesitation qualifies as a true slur on Wilson's better character.

"You weren't thinking clearly once it had got to that point. The chemical imbalances set off by the pheo were riding you."

Wilson shrugs, a hopeless, shapeless, lurch of a gesture. Every time he seems to get close to understanding that he is _not_ the demon he became, he veers away from it, running irrationally between knowing he is and knowing he is not. House wonders if he knows the meds he's taking for his shiny new panic disorder aren't strong enough, that Wilson's still not really thinking "okay" when he gets upset.

He tugs firmly, manhandles Wilson into leaning against his chest. Tentative fingers flutter down to skim over the sections of navy plaid terrycloth robe that lies in lopsided geometric patterns over House's bare legs, exposing one fuzzy knee and the smooth bald skin of his right thigh where the nerve damage has destroyed all the hair. Wilson touches that area tentatively, as if he is remembering the ruined leg straining under his weight as he fought to hold House down.

"I am so sorry."

He can't seem to stop saying that. But House is getting sick of the word, sick of what it means: that they aren't getting past all of this, that history isn't just past, but present, well on its way to being future too.

"I'm so _so_ sor—"

House tightens his hold on Wilson's neck, reels him in until he can swallow the unending apologies. There's a gravestone in his gut until Wilson's hand shoots up and back to clasp the side of his face, drag him deeper into a long, longing, kiss. He tastes salt wetness seeping down onto Wilson's lips and pulls back enough to lip it away with a series of mopping kisses, moving up his cheeks to his eyelids and back down, before he pauses to check he has caught every tear as well as every sorry. Stress-filled brown eyes rove over his face, seek further sign of sanctuary. Chest to Wilson's back, House snakes his free arm around his partner's torso, slots his fingers into the faint grooves of tank-clad ribcage and squeezes tightly.

"Shh. It's okay. Just kiss me."

Damp lips capture his again gratefully, warmly. Needing closeness, needing certainty amidst the musty-smelling boxes that still loom in his peripheries, House works his hand up under Wilson's tank, spreads his fingers over warm skin, searches out Wilson's heartbeat. The sensitive skin of his aureole contracts under House's palm; the nipple stiffens, sets off a shiver of muscles contracting down Wilson's abdomen. House's own body tightens in answer, heat rising like fog to consume the last of the fear and the urge to flight. He arcs his back, presses his groin against Wilson's hip, starts to roll down into the seat of sofa. But Wilson recoils again, won't let House draw him down on top.

"No. _Please_, House, don't push this. I—I don't know if I can. I don't want to hurt…if I do…if I don't…I mean, I still feel terrible—"

Slowly, House sits up, ignoring the vague ache of emptiness down low inside him that Wilson's half-voiced demur suggests may be there a long time.

"Okay," he relents, reluctantly; then, thoughtfully considers pushing Wilson over the other way.

It takes a few moments before the idea even floats into Wilson's consciousness, takes shape in a hesitance that crinkles his brow, makes his dimple appear as he remembers he has now offered it once before. Only then does House crook an eyebrow suggestively and say:

"Wanna try something new?"

Uncertainty crests across Wilson's face. His thigh muscles bunch inside his jeans, though he does not – quite – clamp his legs together. House keeps on gently working at his partner's nipple, measuring the quickening rise and fall of his chest with the nervous breaths he takes, the hop of Wilson's heart beneath his hand. He massages the back of Wilson's neck too, watching, waiting, until Wilson sets his teeth into his lower lip and smoothes his own hand a little higher up House's right leg: high enough to assess the length and girth of what he's considering. It is an interminable moment before he nods.

"Okay," he ventures. "Okay."

TBC…


	18. Chapter 18

_"Easy, easy. Ow! – Ohhhh._ Uh. _Yeah…"_

_Stretched open, Wilson groans. In the mirrored doors of the guest room closet, brown eyes lock with blue. Cold sheets grow humid beneath them as they move. House's arms are twined around his chest, one hand rubs his nipple, the other rests just above his aching groin, steadying Wilson's half-panicked, half-desperate urge to thrust down onto him, to fill himself, fuse them together so that there's no more teetering, tantalising on the brink of something that makes him shake and beg for both less and more. _

_This kind of exposure, this vulnerability, is so overwhelming that he can't, he just _can't,_ and House has to _stop, please, please, please, House, I _can't_, stop_ – can't stop – push in deeper, make Wilson's body roar with this primal need, all straining muscles and sinews, strength and thrusts, aches, sweat, groans and vibrating laughter. _

_This kind of raw intimacy outdoes blindfolded walks across a room in group therapy – the sort of schtick that would have House tripping him on his ass with his cane just to be funny. It's a handover to House's experience that make Wilson tremble at his own ability to trust – and chuckle at how much control he can take back in a well-timed roll or straddle or a simple clench of his pelvic muscles. _

This kind of memory has him moaning aloud. His fingers work deep inside himself as, alone in his own shower room, he replays that first time in the safe neutrality of his guest room. He's unjudgemental now of the way his own fists clenched in the pale fawn bedclothes, of his agitated resistance to being pressed down on his belly, finding not simplicity in it but fear of some irrationally imagined execution, a blow he can't see coming that will leave him on his knees, too hurt to move, as a door bangs shut behind him. He's amused by his own struggles to convince himself that he should take it that way, that he's earned it, that this has to be aggressive, agonising, awful and, above all, unrepeatable. He's aroused by House's teasing patience, his gentleness as he says _can't_ to the missionary position, with a glare for his rickety leg, then guides Wilson over onto his side, spoons up behind him so that they can keep tabs on each other in the glass.

His breath comes faster and his cock hardens until it hurts as he works himself, remembering that fourth and final try to interlock their bodies, to find a rhythm, holding each other, studying each other's shudders and shuttered eyes. Remembering that sudden stomach-clenching, scary, hope-inducing shiver as he realised that it could work this way, after all. That House was thrusting harder, that it hurt-ached-throbbed-pulsed but _ohmygod, I can do this, _want _this_ – until House cried out and buried his face in Wilson's clavicle and heat spurted into him, revoltingly delicious. Until his partner's boneless slump reorganised itself into limbs and dextrous hands that worked Wilson slowly, steadily, then sharply to his own muffled shout into the pillow and wet mess on the sheets. Until they lay, sweating, in a breathless stare-off in the mirror. Until one of them – he can't remember which – dared to cave and smile. To acknowledge joint victory and renewed hope.

Wilson comes suddenly, all over his other hand, and leans against the hot wet tiles for a few moments, grinning like a fool.

Steaming water hurtles down over him, sluicing the pleasant mess and the memory off him, returns him to the somewhat frustrating reality of another weekend alone and a late finish off the nightshift. Checking his hands are clean, Wilson slops shampoo into his palm and dollops it onto his hair. He's worked up a thick bonnet of bubbles when his doorknocker claps. Typical. Figuring it's Denise, he pokes his head around the curtain and calls:

"Come in!"

His front door creaks. But, instead of the jumbled cacophony of rubber soled sneakers and clawed paws on floorboards, there's a staccato click of high heels. Wilson bolts out of the shower and grabs his checked robe off the towel rail.

"Hello?"

He pads barefoot out into the bedroom, hastens to the door that opens into the lounge. Standing uncertainly on the doormat is…

"Lisa?"

Wilson stops short, his stomach doing anxious acrobatics. _House._ _What's happened to House?_

Before he can ask, she raises one hand in a tight little wave.

"Hi. I'm sorry. This is a bad time."

_Not House_. She wouldn't care about the time if it were. So why is she here? Suddenly conscious of a line of bubbles slithering down his brow, Wilson swipes them away and stammers:

"Uh…" _Yes._ "No. I-it's okay. I, uh, I thought you were the dog-sitter."

"I should have called."

_Yes._

A puddle is accumulating at his feet.

"Uh…"

Once upon a time he'd not have minded her dropping in unannounced; but that was long before he and House tore up the happy ending in their queer fairytale.

"It's, um…"

_Don't lie. You don't have to pretend everything is fine when it isn't, James. Trust that you can be honest with yourself – and with other people._

He rubs a drip off his nose, obscuring any unwelcoming expression that might be tempted to creep up on him behind his hand and hedges:

"You're here now. Um. Would you like to help yourself to some coffee? I'll just be a few moments."

"Thank you."

* * *

She's made coffee for both of them when he returns. Denise has been and gone, taking her cheque from under the fridge magnet. Hippo is snuggled against Cuddy's legs, leaving long strands of golden hair affixed by static to her hose. His chin is splodged contentedly on her knees. Guard dog he is not.

He is, however, a master at teaching strangers to find the exact spot under his ears that he likes to have rubbed. Wilson pauses in the doorway, still towelling his hair. He'd figured Cuddy for a cat person; but she ruffles his adoring dog's fur with every sign of enjoyment.

Folding the towel, he hooks it over the nearest radiator and joins her in the crescent of ugly mismatched couches that overlook the city through the broad windows behind the TV. Summer has come to Chicago. It sparkles off the skyscrapers' windows, turns an urban fortress of towering angular architecture into a glitteringly fantastical otherwhere between fairytale castles and futuresque extra-planetary dwellings. A business block glows cobalt-black, its smoothed corners making it blur with the blazing blue of the sky, jar against the hard paleness of nearby counterparts, as if it has been photoshopped inexpertly in. Past the cityscape, sunlight scribbles silver ribbons and reflections on improbably turquoise water. Stick figures jog along the waterfront, labouring through air so heavy and hazy that it concertinas into mirages above the roads. The rise and fall of running engines and horns in the cars queuing along the main road sounds, as it always does to Wilson, like the roars of concert-goers, parade-spectators, cheering and applauding unceasingly. Chicago, he believes, likes itself.

Cuddy's presence throws that low-grade celebratory normalness into relief, reminds him of why he has never unpacked. Much as he'd like to, he doesn't really fit in here.

He takes his cooling coffee from its perch atop an unopened box labelled _misc._ and sits opposite her in a podgy patterned bucket-chair.

"Are you, uh, are you here consulting? Or—" he catches sight of a slim black folder beside her on the couch, lightly drooled on by his inelegant companion. "For a consult?"

"I'm not actually." She affects her usual authority, though beneath she seems as unsure of herself as he is. She glances over at him, as if to check he's fully finished with his ablations. Then she sets her cup aside. "Would you mind if we took a walk?"

"Uh, sure." He's tired, but all thoughts of sleep have been flung to the far reaches of his mind. Set out of sync with his own domain, he's uneasy, awkward. Whatever she's here for won't go any better for that. He gulps down half his coffee in one go and gets to his feet. "I'll just grab his lead."

When she gets up to join him, the dog comes but the black file stays on the couch.

* * *

A hot breeze scuds across their faces as they follow gravel paths through the cultivated flower and herb garden just past the cycle rental opening to Millennium Park. Cuddy holds a red rubber ball in her left hand, Wilson Hippo's lead in his right. The dog sashays along between them, panting, but eyeing the ball eagerly. Once he's unleashed on the sandy tracks beyond, Cuddy hauls back and hurls. The ball arcs into the air and zooms. Hippo belts off after it, spit and ears flying.

"How are things with you and House?"

The question doesn't surprise him. It's been over six months since the intervention at House's apartment. Apart from one or two uncomfortable phone calls, Wilson hasn't spoken to her. He hesitates, not sure he knows how to confide in her, knows that he never really did.

"They're, uh…things are…"

He sucks his lips against his teeth, reluctant to lie, unwilling to find himself unfairly in cuffs again. Their footsteps crunch loudly, steady contrast to his verbal stumbling as they bypass the strange spidery wire-web structure that guards a sports field. Taking a breath, Wilson glances habitually at the diamond-shaped roof of another office block beyond, still expecting from the look of it for it to somehow come unzipped. Of course, it never does.

Cuddy stoops to collect the slimy ball from the dog, pitches it again and wipes her hand on her skirt, waiting.

"They're both fine, better than ever, and a little rough," he ventures, at last. "We're going through a tricky patch, not seeing a lot of each other right now."

A wrinkly 'w' appears between her eyebrows; he explains hastily.

"His schedule, mine…it's been hard to get the time this last month."

It's been harder to get the money, but he keeps that to himself. He still pays his ex-wives alimony and his therapy bills cost the earth. Add that to several new starts in the last few years, with gaps between jobs, and his credit is in the basement. It sucks, it scares him, and he knows he's been snappy with frustration. He knows too that House lied to him, that he could've flown out this weekend, that Wilson snarled at him over a stupid joke that it wasn't his turn to get stuffed in a flying can full of other people's farts, that House got spooked and now they're both edgy and alone for no good reason.

"You miss him," Cuddy states.

He shuts his eyes against the stinging glare of the sun, nods. They haven't had a whole weekend together since just after House finished diagnosing Mrs. Hummel with the ninth known case of Idiopathic Pleuroparenchymal Fibroelastosis.

Softly, he admits: "Too much."

"Oh?"

The enquiry is unexpectedly kind; any ulterior concern is deeply buried. He watches her take the ball from Hippo again, draw back and throw it. She uses her whole body, steps forward into the swing. Someone taught her how to throw properly. He doubts most men could pull it off in strappy stilettos. He reminds himself that Cuddy isn't like many women either; she's neither a sucker for his charm nor apt to bust his balls.

"It's intense," he admits, meeting her sidelong glance halfway as they bifurcate the long green openness of the park, drawn instinctively toward the underpass that leads across toward the lake. "It always was. It's got…harder lately. We've got pretty close again. But living this far away… it puts a new kind of pressure on. He gets tired from the pain and sitting on a plane doesn't help. I've been on call a lot lately. It's a different kind of difficult, constantly _dating_ like we're still in the honeymoon period, trying to prove ourselves to each other. It's tough just trying to hang out as friends."

"I know you've been Skyping him."

_That_ definitely doesn't qualify as hanging out simply as friends. Wilson bites on a smile, seeing in the gaudy underground mosaics that line the walls of the underpass the brief pixellations before his webcam image stabilises. He thinks of the heart-racing voyeuristic late night hook-ups: of House wearing stubble and shucked-down boxers bucking on his scruffy leather couch or the threadbare Ottoman in his office; of his own laptop overheating, fan whirring wildly on his bed, as his own flesh grows thick and throbs in the palm of his hand; of stifled shouts and mutual breathlessness tearing up the airwaves in the sticky afterglow; of stupid matching grins mirrored back at one another through the connection.

"And calling," Cuddy adds.

The Diagnostic department's phone bill must be through the roof. She, kindly, doesn't admit to knowing, or at least suspecting, why House's office blinds are often closed and his fellows ejected into the halls, lab or clinic when he feels like taking a break. They emerge into daylight still able to look at one another.

Wilson takes the brief pause while they cross the six-lane road to get his mind out of the cross-state home videos that have accumulated. Then they find themselves amongst the joggers, no longer twiggy representations of humanity but shorts-and-sneaker clad puffing fitness fanatics, blowing cheerily at each other as they run in pairs or to passers-by. A sudden jab of loneliness catches him under the ribs and he finds himself saying plaintively:

"It's not the same."

When it isn't X-rated, it's worse. Popcorn on couch arms, chortling at the TV, the handset growing warm under his ear and House's wicked commentary running down the line, he wouldn't give it up…but it makes him ache. The peep of the end-call button heralds a silence louder and echoier than it was before the call connected. He misses the scratch of House's stubble on the back of his neck, the long lazy loop of an arm around his waist, the boniness of House's shoulder under his temple and the easy quiet of one or other apartment. He misses being with House, at home.

"Have you talked about any longer term options?"

"Not really."

Wilson has deliberately set course away from the jetty down towards the outcrop of land that is liberally sown with tourist centres: Grecian columned aquariums and museums, with multiple entry tickets sold by street-vendors. But, heading this way, Cuddy inevitably pauses to take in the ornate Buckingham Memorial fountain across the street from the lake. A group of Chinese nuns mounted on Segway two-wheelers touring the lake's delights are ferociously flashbulbing the blonde and cherub-cheek-pink stone, seahorse festooned, monstrosity into an abstract glare.

Hippo deserts his newly adopted companion in a huff, nudges impatiently at Wilson's knee, leaving damp spit-spots on his jeans. He bends to take the ball, taking the momentary hiatus to try to make sense of the conversation as he answers.

"We're, um… We're not… I mean…"

He falters, wary of telling her.

She guesses, turns her back on the fountain at the exact moment its central jet shoots up, splicing a hundred and fifty-feet of sky in two.

"You're both still waiting to see if it all goes wrong."

Wilson juggles the ball in his cupped palm and looks down at it, shamefaced.

"Yeah."

She nods pensively, as if she understands although, really, she can't.

"It's been nearly a year, hasn't it?"

"Since we first met up again?" He moves eagerly away from the fountain; it's ugliness to him another reminder that he doesn't quite belong here, yet that it remains the closest thing he has to call home. "Yeah. Nine months. We've been together for six."

"Is it going wrong?" Cuddy ducks under a low branch that overhangs the sentinel's watch of trees that face the lake, between the concrete walkway of the waterfront and the sand-track that skirts the road and the tiers of roads and parks that enclose the city beyond. "Honestly?"

He looks away across the lake and back towards his apartment, picks out the white hull of the _Solace_ nestled in her harbour. His lips tingle with the memory of that first kiss. He shakes his head, says only:

"I don't want to jinx it."

Cuddy follows his gaze across the water without knowing why.

"Then this may come at a bad time."

He looks at her sharply, becomes nervous as he realises they've reached the opening of the black file.

"What is it?"

"I've come to offer you your old job back."

"Wha—?" The ball slips from Wilson's fingers, tumbles away toward the water. Hippo bounds obliviously after it. "_What?_"

Cuddy seems torn between conviction and trepidation.

"Your replacement, Chen, resigned yesterday morning. Something about having his case files reorganised and covered in stickers. Smiley faces, skulls and coffins. I believe the categories were Alive and Annoying, Not Quite Dead and Six Feet Under."

Wilson laughs before he can stop himself. Cuddy stops trying to hide her own grin.

"I don't believe it's the first time." She rolls her eyes. "If I didn't know better, I'd think House was trying to push Chen into leaving." She pauses. "Come to think of it: I _don't_ know better."

It's got House's manipulative bitch streak written all over it. Tedious as it is undoing his practical jokes in the middle of a busy workday, it's also every bit as charming as the incorrigible jerk thinks it is. Wilson tries not to hope this is exactly what it looks like: one of House's roundabout invitations to move forward.

He asks carefully: "Are you sure?"

Cuddy squats to take the ball from Hippo again, squints up at him through the sunlight dappling her hair.

"Are you accepting?"

His heart skips, then sinks. He bites his tongue.

"I don't know. It's a nice offer, but—"

"I know you know the salary. That we can only equal what you're being paid here purely for consulting, when you'd be head of department again with us. We're still a small, cash-strapped hospital, that hasn't changed. And you must know that the department's reputation has slipped somewhat since you were in charge. It's still good, but Chicago is better."

"It's not that." He's grateful to have any job at all after the mess he's made of his work profile over the last few years. "It's—"

"House."

"Yeah. I'm not sure if it's a good idea, us working together again. We're okay, Cuddy. But I don't know if we would be if we go back to how things were. It might be great – it was before I got really sick – I'm just not sure…"

"You should talk to him."

He's struck by her calmness; her hesitation seems to have vanished.

"Why are you doing this? I didn't think you trusted me."

"As a doctor? I've always trusted you there. As…" She stalls for a few seconds, straightens up and ventures cautiously: "As a friend, I'm extending an olive branch. I've done a lot of thinking and I know that I didn't fully appreciate what it must have cost you to call me when you hurt House so badly he needed hospitalisation or how difficult it must have been for you to face up to your problems, to go through the court case and the surgery and all that treatment alone.

"It was incredibly brave of you to apologise to all of us – I know House didn't think of _that_ on his own – and to start over from scratch. You're more the man I thought I knew than the monster that you sometimes seemed. It doesn't excuse what you did, Wilson. But it does earn you my forgiveness."

Her words are soft, but very sure. His shuddering exhale gets lost in the breeze. Cuddy lays a hand on his arm briefly, bridging the gulf between them. Then she shoots the ball underarm and walks on, ambling now, no longer briskly purposeful.

"Will you talk to House about my offer?"

Wilson falls into step with her, watching Hippo pounce and bark at the ball, as if it will throw itself any second. A passing jogger laughs, kicks it for him, sends the dog leaping about in a frenzy of excitement.

"Yeah, I will. When do you need to know?"

"As soon as you can, but you've got a couple of weeks grace. If you think it's too soon, I'll understand. I can't hold the post, but I can put in a good word for you at Trenton; I know they'll be looking for a new oncologist when Montgomery retires next spring."

"Thank you."

She smiles and, though age lines run rampant over her once pretty face, she seems happier than he remembers her being.

"I'd be glad to have you back, as an employee," she admits. "And…and I think it might work better with House than you're daring to believe. He's been different since you came back on the scene."

"Different?"

"Yeah," she falters for a few seconds, then opens up in turn. "One of the many reasons I was angry with you at the apartment was because he was a wreck for so long after you left. It took him months to be emotionally ready to handle his physio and to lower his pain medication again and I honestly thought he'd retreat into himself and refuse to co-operate."

Her eyes grow troubled again; her brow bends.

"It was almost worse when he did. He was still House about it, difficult, resistant, manipulative; but it was as though most of the fight had gone out of him. He went along with rehab and therapy and they said he was better. He came back to work, picked up more cases, more hours, started spending time with me and with his team socially. But…it was like dealing with someone who was pretending to be himself. A 2D cut out instead of the live 3D. I've been dreading how much lower he could sink if you came in and hurt him again."

Her curls blow back in the breeze, her frown smoothing out into a tentative shade of joy.

"But…it hasn't happened, Wilson. And, believe me, I've been watching for it. If anything, he's got better still. He almost reminds me of what he was like _before_ the infarction, before the Vicodin. He's not toeing some party line, losing himself in puzzles; he's like a kid with a Cluedo set again at work, all energy and practical jokes. He's as high as a kite, but he's taking less medication than I think I've ever known him to. He's not just following a recovery programme any more; he's _living_ it.

She darts a look at him, amusement and fond irritation surfacing as she clarifies:

"I mean, he's still _House._ Watching terrible television when he should be in Clinic, missing every departmental meeting I don't physically drag him to, and pawning all his paperwork off on his team. But he's…I think he's happy."

Wilson's face warms, half smile, half sunshine. When he opens his eyes, Cuddy is grinning at him.

"I'm glad you're glad about that too."

One day, Wilson hopes that he'll be able to be pleased for himself as well, that it won't be undercut by this sudden surge of fear that he'll screw it all up somehow. He reminds himself that House is more than enough of a cynic to share that too, realises he's all the more terrified of doing something to ruin it, to disappoint them both.

Why wouldn't he? He's always been a disappointment.

"I'll talk to him," he repeats, retreating into formality and self-doubt. Hippo flops down under a tree nearby and sighs at him from a patch of shady green amidst the sun-tarnished grass. "I don't want to rush anything. I've got to put us first here, Cuddy. That's more important than my career."

"He always was." Her smile softens, grows retrospective, remembering his stand-off on House's behalf with a former Chairman of the Board. "Think it over."

She stops and faces him, abruptly serious once more.

"I'm trusting you to make the decision that's right for both of you here, Wilson. Do not let me down."

TBC…


	19. Chapter 19

**To everyone who has been patiently awaiting updates on this and on **_**Selective Amnesia**_**, I apologise. I've been unwell for several months now and it is making it difficult to spend long periods of time writing, editing, etc. I am NOT giving up on these stories and I will do my best to keep updating. I really appreciate the supportive comments that many of you are sending – so thanks and hang in there!**

* * *

His schedule wrapped up sooner than expected, House arrives early at Wilson's new apartment. He parks the Repso, sheds his helmet and limps up the short flight of steps to the main door. At the top, a lady leading a yapping pack of creatures that resemble spaghetti made into a balloon animals decorated with a diamante collars is surveying the clammy, darkening sky warily. She recognises him and, seeing his hands are full, braces her ample back to the door to hold it open. He navigates the excess of poodle, takes the clanking elevator to the third floor. He has a key to Wilson's place, but he doesn't need it. The door is unexpectedly ajar.

He pauses outside, cranes his neck to check the gap over the door in case there's a bucket of water poised above. Wilson's wicked retaliatory sense of humour is returning and he still owes House for busting out of a moving box bellowing _surprise!_ the first day he arrived here. But only a stray strand of cobweb waves lazily at him in a draft. When he pushes the door open, the apartment appears deserted.

Wilson's jogging shoes are lined up with his loafers just inside beneath the coat pegs, so he isn't off for a run or trying out a gym. At six-thirty p.m. on a Saturday, he could be anywhere: buffing bits of the _Solace_ in her new harbour, at the store fetching new odds and ends for his place, having a meal with Cuddy. But none of those are reasons to leave his door unsecured. Hippo, heaped on his memory foam mattress over by the sofa, is a lousy burglar deterrent. The dog lifts his head as House enters, but doesn't stir. His tail thumps once. His limpid eyes are doleful, as if he's been shouted at.

The unexpected hush begins to ring in House's ears, amplifies the tinnitus that is a leftover from his four-day coma. He tells himself it does not sound like an alarm bell. But his fingers warp into pale knots around his cane handle and he scans the room for other harbingers: an open liquor bottle, a broken glass – the ominous breadcrumb trail to the bloody chamber kind of fairytale. A split-second later it dawns that the sign he's looking for may be looking back.

He has to resist the urge to put his helmet back on as he crosses the room. He crouches beside the dog, probes through the thick blond fur for haematomas, the crunchy edge of a fracture or sticky crimson of a gash. His fingers stumble near the ribcage. He tastes metal and his pads slip on the red film forming swirls on his skin.

Fear massing below his Adam's apple, he peers through the coat, finds only dense layers of hair, a few flecks of mud, and the unexpected angle of an elbow that is perfectly normal canine anatomy. Hippo snuffs his wrist, mildly curious, licks one unbloodied hand, then simply sighs. An uncomfortable gut-jab of guilt chastises the haunted imagining.

Clambering to his feet, House sighs too. He wouldn't have thought twice about the open door had this been Chicago. No bucket, no Wilson, no problem. He'd've grabbed himself a Coke from the fridge and sprawled out to ransack Wilson's TiVo until he got yelped at for recording over some noncey gardening show. Slowly he looks around once more, trying to see through the ghosts of Princeton past to what is really there.

The décor is standard 'for let' neutral, but Wilson's been here for three weeks and already the place looks more like home than the windy city apartment he rented for a little over a year. A rich pastel landscape of Lake Michigan painted by one of Wilson's fellow inmates at Horizons brightens up one of the beige living room walls. A sturdy antique table that Cuddy had spare occupies a corner, already laden with Princeton Plainsboro headed paperwork. The sofa and two reclining chairs are new, cream leather and mahogany, plush, and purchased on credit to accompany the giant plasma screen TV, complete with surround-sound speakers, DVD player and X-box.

The latter essentials had oh so mysteriously been awaiting Wilson, along with his House-in-the-box welcome, on his return to Princeton. The shiny toys had born an old hospital canteen receipt for two meals charged to Wilson's credit card, a handwritten IOU and a large smiley face. A quick glance shows it's still sentimentally taped to the top of the DVD player. Wilson, after all, is not the only one who is trying to make amends.

Mentally ticking off the places that his partner can be if he isn't here and isn't issuing larceny invites to all the town's petty offenders, House peers pointlessly into the open-plan cream-and-chrome kitchen, then tramps down the passage to the bedrooms. A peep into the guest room reveals half a home furnishing store's worth of unopened flat-packs, a plastic-wrapped mattress and unassembled bed frame, inserted awkwardly around a squat wall of hitherto unpacked moving crates. Unless Wilson's secretly shipping himself off to Timbuktu to avoid the last slog of unpacking, he isn't stuffed in there.

He moves on to the – _their _– bedroom. The neatly made smoke-blue bedcovers and one of his own favourite Stratocaster guitars occupying a corner chair give no further clue as to his partner's whereabouts. Only a set of car keys strewn on the top of the dresser indicate that he should be here. House reviews the options: down in the laundry room, taking out the trash, borrowing sugar or a screwdriver from a neighbour… Then the soft splosh of water from a faucet summons him through to the adjoining bathroom.

The misgivings he's been trying to quell rise again as he approaches. The varnished wood door stands to but not closed. He's conscious that his footsteps are heavy, the carpets not thick; even with soft-soled sneakers and a rubber tip to his cane Wilson should be able to hear him. The man's pathological politeness dictates that he should call out or come out. It doesn't occur to House that he doesn't do so himself, that his own suspiciously silent approach is akin to whistling the soundtrack to some horror-movie moment.

Shifting his grip from the crook to the shaft, House cautiously stretches out with his cane and nudges the door a little further ajar. The growing gap reveals Wilson standing in front of the taped together pieces of his shaving mirror, which is balanced on a shelf above the sink. He has a washcloth bunched up in his hand, mopping at his jaw. In spite of his usually OCD toilet routine, accomplished between six and seven am, he seems to have just finished shaving. The way the electric lighting bounces off the blue tiles – supposedly soothingly, actually crypt-like – obscures the nuances of his expression. Once House's eyes adjust, he realises that Wilson is frowning, distracted from his surroundings by wet drops slinking down his chin to land pinkish in the sink. He must've nicked himself.

The hinges grunt and Wilson looks up. He catches sight of the looming crook reflected above his head in the mirror and shies violently, collides with the nearby cabinet. Disturbed bottles rattle and clank inside. He staggers, then catches himself, one palm splayed flat against the tiles behind him. The other arm flies up and House ducks instinctively, body braced for an answering impact.

It doesn't come. Wilson dives behind his upraised arm as though he expects the cane to swing one-eighty and strike him instead. It's a gesture House has used a hundred times himself. He lets his cane drop quickly, watches Wilson goggle at it until it touches the floor.

"Sorry," he says quickly, a reflex triggered by the fixated glaze in Wilson's eyes. "Sorry. Sorry."

"Shhhhhiiit."

Wilson exhales over a belated curse, eyelids shuttering for a few seconds as he re-gathers his breath. Still plastered to the wall, he slowly lowers the defensive guard of his arm and half-buries his face in his palm as he wrests down any impulse to retaliate by taking several more deep breaths. When he rights himself, only his voice retains the concussive edge of shocky reactive ire.

"What are you _doing_ here, House?"

_Wishing he didn't have his hands full of such solid, easy to make weapons of, things_.

He cocks his chin, feigns casualness. "Gate-crashing."

Wilson takes several more measured breaths through his fingers, wraps his free hand restrainingly around the edge of the basin. Anger, or the vestiges of shock, send tremors down his arm.

"Obviously." He presses the cloth still clamped in his other hand a little harder against his jaw, speaks out of one corner of his mouth. "You should've called first."

_No kidding._

Nerves twanging with the ongoing need to dodge a blow that – he hopes – isn't coming, House strives to maintain his masquerade of calm.

"That would defeat the object. Besides, you gave me a key."

Wilson shoots him a strange look, face still mostly obscured by the flannel, and turns back toward the broken mirror.

"I didn't say you could just come over whenever you felt like it."

House's stomach folds up on itself, scrunching like a paper ball ready to be discarded.

He shakes his head, insists: "Actually, that's exactly what a key says: turn up, let yourself in, _whenever_. You gave me your key; I gave you closet space and a toothbrush. According to every chick-flick magazine out there, we're in the pre-shacking up phase somewhere between shtupping and living sappily ever after."

"House, _please._" Wilson grips the edge of the basin tighter with his left hand; his knuckles bleach to match the porcelain. "Those may be all the appropriate steps, but with us being what we are, I don't think it's a good idea to invest too much in them – do you?"

Paper ball organs tumble, kicked, to the dank ignored corners of House's soul. His head begins to pound with the sound of slamming doors, brutal banishments. For all Wilson's flightiness, it's been a while since he made House feel simply unwelcome. Disorientated by the renewing sense that he is all but beyond toleration, it takes him several seconds to recognise the mismatch between Wilson's words and his voice. The latter doesn't sound like his. It's flat, over-enunciating, vowels all squashed and consonants rounded in the wrong places. There's a tone that he's trying not to use and doing a poor job of avoiding.

The small chamber suddenly swells with the sense of words unspoken, events unseen. House scrutinises Wilson's profile. His oh so civilised expression that is as fragile as a porcelain mask. That look, that intonation, House had courted the consequences of them for years. But – _but_ and it _matters_ – he had always ignored the cause.

It's got nothing to do with the pair of them being hair-trigger PTSD convalescents, mutual abusers and equal victims in a genealogy of GBH; for that, following steps is all they're supposed to invest in. But it's got everything to do with _why_ they are. He flashes back on the curbstones outside, the haphazard angle at which Wilson's car is parked, the open door, the lurking dog, and feels his stomach curdle with the same urgency to get inside, get _away_. He breathes through it, reminds himself not to bridle at the patronisingly formal tone that is sure to be parroted back to him, patriarch to subject, overling to underling, father to son.

"Yeah, I do," he says firmly.

He seeks Wilson's eyes, his reaction, in the mirror; but his partner keeps his face averted. He's staring wretchedly at one shoulder of the sky blue and pink _bowlers do it in teams_ shirt that House has been wearing since he met Cameron, Chase, Hadley and Taub for today's competition as part of his new throwing bones to his watchdogs regime. There's a peace symbol on the chest pocket, for fuck's sake. Yeah, he thinks they should invest in what they are. But he also knows what _appropriate_ means.

He presses carefully, giving his next words the homophobic inflection Wilson was struggling to swallow.

"But you mean because we're _not_?"

Minute fasciculations convulse Wilson's muscles, betray the echo of a verbal lash. He digs his fingers into the edge of the basin so hard that he should be leaving notches in the porcelain. Still crushed against his face, the washcloth bleeds discoloured water down his green polo shirt.

"Go home," he says, voice strangled. "Go home, House. It's not a good idea for you to be here tonight."

To his credit, he waits until House has stepped out of the bathroom before he slams the door into its frame with his foot.

* * *

Over the soundtrack of residual blood being sluiced down the drain, House backtracks to the lounge. His pulse is skittering and his limbs feel too light, as if he swims through the sensation of having dodged a bullet-fast fist. Perhaps he hasn't. Perhaps he is strewn on the floor, blood filling his mouth and star-bright splashes bouncing on his retinas. Perhaps…he's being an idiot. Wilson is wound-up, upset, on the cusp of an anger that has, for the most part, been carved out and cremated as hospital waste. What is left in its place when he finally falls from the brink remains to be seen. But it had better not be fucking _appropriate._

Figuring the couch is far enough "away" in his new home from home, House drops down hard amidst the cushions. He tucks his cane and helmet safely out of easy reach under the coffee table, puts his feet up on it and waits. It's over twenty minutes before he hears the bathroom door reopen and Wilson's footsteps moving steadily down the passageway.

His partner halts on the threshold to the lounge. He hasn't put any lights on and the gathering clouds outside cast murky shadows into the various rooms and doorways that branch off the lounge. With his back to the window, House, the couch and the rug under his feet are trapped in a half-globe of lingering light. It has that stormy surreal sheen to it, makes the dimness in the passageway seem darker. Wilson makes no effort to come forward, stays as a sturdy shape in the gloom. His voice matches the incoming darkness, issues a clipped rebuke:

"What are you still doing here, House?"

He looks up slowly from a show he wasn't watching, mutes the already lowered volume.

"Bike's out of gas," he lies. "I was going to siphon some off your tank, but your car's out too."

There's a startled pause. Apparently his car _is_ out of gas. Huh. Lucky guess.

"Your turn." As the static of the TV carbonates the continued hush, he adds helpfully. "You could try telling me you had a bad day at work or you've got a migraine or you wrenched your back playing _Dance Dance Revolution_ 'cause a patient gave it to you or—"

"I should lie to you?" He can't make out Wilson's features, but he can hear the frown. "Not usually part of any strategy for rebuilding trust."

House stares steadily into the mouth of the passage.

"Handbook's already been tossed."

The shadows shift and Wilson's silhouette turns its back to the wall, supports itself against the plaster. A thin finger of stray light points out a lock of bright brown hair, the pale line of a cheekbone, the tip of his nose angled down, as though he is studying the toes of the shoes he always takes off at the door.

"No," he says slowly. "I don't think it has. But you obviously know where I was. I'm not going to pretend otherwise."

"Because lying is wrong?"

That comes out all pseudo-sunny and sarcastic. "You told me you were going to quit seeing them."

"No." Bitten off, that; Wilson sucks air past his teeth, tries to speak without snapping. "No. I _said_ that I'd stop going _if I couldn't fix things with them._ Him, really. But it was my mom who called. She… Look, it's harder than you think to just cut off your family—"

House bristles at the truth of it, obdurately denies: "The only way I'm ever going to see the Colonel again is in the Obits column."

A fleeting gleam of eyes in the darkness. He doesn't see them, no, but Wilson knows him well enough to suspect he will still only dodge eight out of every ten calls from his mother, avoid speaking to his own father only nine.

"I know you say that, but it's different for me. I'm Jewish. We're family orientated. I have to at least _try_—"

Riled, more because Wilson is right than because he is wrong, House levels a counter-charge.

"It's the trying that screws you over! Wilson, you've done nothing _but_ try. He's always going to make you feel like you fail—"

"_Almost_ always," Wilson corrected, that particular cruelty softening his voice.

House's ire shifts direction, to the handsome son of a bitch surgeon who can make his Wilson wince like that, but he speaks too quickly, too harshly.

"Worked out well, huh?"

"Perfect," Wilson acknowledges bitterly.

"What the hell do you even have to say to him?" House demands, knowing he should stop but narked enough to loose traction on his own tongue, shut his teeth without knowing _why_ his partner would risk coming home like this.

"Twelve steps, remember? I owe him an apology too."

"Yeah? What kind? I'm sorry I let you hit me when I was too young to stop you?"

The strand of light disappears. The shadows seem heavier. The silence crackles.

The answer is unexpected.

"I never told him about us. I never told him about our fights or the trial or the rehab. I've never tried to talk to him about what's happened to me or why. He—" A castrated, mirthless chuckle. "Until today, he thought I was still married to Julie."

House gawps at his partner's shadowy outline, imagines that he sees what his family must now see. Wilson wears deceit like most men wear clothes. He wonders, uneasily, if he has ever truly seen Wilson naked.

His voice comes huskily. He hardly knows how to speak, let alone what to say.

"No skeletons in your family closet then."

"We don't so much have a closet as a crypt. It probably leads to Narnia. Anyway, I got as far as telling him I'd divorced and, after a few relocations working through some personal problems, moved back to Princeton, because that's where my best friend – you – are."

The reassurance doesn't go unnoticed, though House hardly dares to trust it now. He responds reflexively:

"How did that go?"

Wilson stirs. Slowly, he pushes away from the wall, steps out of the shadows and turns toward House. One side of his face is striped crimson and purpling from temple to teeth. His lower lip is split and swollen, his chin grazed. Beneath his eye, dark swelling has formed a small crescent-shaped pouch. House goes statue-stiff with astonishment.

"Son of a bitch," he breathes. "I thought you said your father _used_ to hit you?"

Wilson raises a stiff little shrug.

"What you didn't know used to hurt you anyway. I wasn't looking for the sympathy vote." He touches his face gingerly and flinches a little, withdraws his fingers. "But the only time he's ever stopped is when I'm not there to get in the way of whatever he has to hand."

_Jesus. H._ Understanding smashes over House the way his cane had done.

"Let me guess," he drawls, words hissing like steam through his teeth. He reaches down and grabs the offending article from its hidey-hole under the couch, holds it up. "He uses one of these."

He sees his answer in Wilson's involuntary blench. The sharply contained stiffening of his body is enough that House wants to snap the damn stick across his knee and burn the pieces in a cleansing ritual. It doesn't matter that – what with the concussion and the coma – he can't remember what it was they fought about, how it began, or why. He knows, he just _knows_, that on that final fateful night over two and a half years ago, he began the end of them when he struck Wilson with his cane.

Tossing the accursed thing back on the floor where it belongs, House propels himself to his feet. Limping to stand a few feet from his partner, beside the TV and the X-box, he looks Wilson straight in the eye, spreads his arms and invites:

"Think you can keep it to once this time?"

Wilson's eyebrows do that quizzical little upward hook they do when he is honestly confounded. Sensing tension, Hippo whines softly from his mattress. Wilson half-glances toward him and something in the dog's worried slump to duck his chin behind his paws as though he would, were he human, cover his eyes makes Wilson blink and catch on. His face goes blank with shock.

His gaze shifting to the cane, he visibly puts together that House has, at last, recognised his worst, his ultimate trigger, and that he is offering the only thing he can think of in recompense: catharsis. With a slight dip of his chin to acknowledge that he understands, Wilson strides toward him.

House takes a deep breath, squares his stance, raises his chin and shuts his eyes.

The dull gulp of a weakened floorboard bowing underfoot makes him prise them open again. Wilson has stopped short. Fresh surprise bleeds hot colour across his cheeks. Too late, House realises what else his open-armed stance offers, what it is that Wilson was intending to do.

Colouring slightly at his own myopia, he jerks his chin awkwardly in an alternative RSVP. When Wilson doesn't move, he growls under his breath, steps jerkily forward, seizes his partner's shoulder and drags him across the last strip of carpet.

Relief, and the sudden release of tension, makes them collide with a thud: head to head, chest to chest, heart to heart. Wilson's arms noose fiercely around him; his hands knot into the back of House's shirt. Breathless from the force of his partner's hold House hugs back, hard enough that if there are other unseen bruises it has to hurt, but Wilson seems to need that. Burrowing his bruised face down into House's clavicle, he half-suffocates himself in the cheap sweaty peace-and-love schtick bowling shirt.

"Easy," House finds himself murmuring, lips pressed to Wilson's nape, and his eyes crushed shut against an uncomfortable stinging heat behind them. "It's okay. You're safe here. You're okay."

And, although he bites his lip against a twinge from his uncooperative leg, for the first time it seems possible that home – their home – doesn't have to be where the hurt is.

TBC…


	20. Chapter 20

**Just a quick note to say a huge THANK YOU! to all the folks who are leaving reviews without reply urls - I can't thank you each personally, but there have been so many lovely things said I wanted to let you know I really appreciate your comments and support :D**

* * *

It's several moments before their combined entangled weight incites further protest from House's leg. He shifts with an indrawn breath and Wilson gently detaches himself. He heads for the kitchen, returns with an icepack and a heat pack that activates when exposed to air. He passes the latter to House, who plonks down onto the couch, rips off the outer packaging and plasters the pack gratefully over his thigh. Between the exertion of bowling and the uneasy tension that has racked him since he arrived, his thigh is griping in fitful spasms.

Wilson takes a seat beside him and wraps the icepack in a white dishtowel, moulds it gingerly to his jaw. The cold makes his teeth chatter and he bends double, braces his elbow on his knee as though his head is spinning. They sit in silence, shoulders touching. There's a strange sort of comfort in the ritual, though the familiarity of it is rendered new by the unmolested tidiness of the apartment and the froofy cotton scent of air freshener instead of spilt spirits.

When the icepack starts to drip onto Wilson's cream chinos, House reaches up to take it from him.

"Here. Let me see."

Wilson, bless his bleeding heart, has bought the kind of hot-pack designed for thighs, so House can secure the straps and use both hands. He tilts Wilson's chin toward him with one hand, gently explores the dark line of bruising on his left cheek with the other. His partner inhales sharply as he palpates the zygomatic bone. House checks his pupil response, assesses for numbness, jaw movement, and the degree of swelling. Finally, he rewraps the pack in its cloth and cups it between the palm of his hand and Wilson's battered face.

"It's probably just a bad soft tissue bruise, but you may have a hairline fracture of the cheekbone. Should get it x-rayed to be sure."

Wilson snorts softly: "I'll get right on that. I'm sure a visit to our E.R. with a broken face won't get one of us arrested."

House grimaces. Foreman will be paged for a neuro consult, if not Taub in plastics; Cuddy has eyes all over the hospital. For all she's trying to be supportive, it's like being on one-to-ones in Mayfield again. She seems mostly convinced they should be wearing not lab coats but straitjackets.

"We could drive to Trenton."

"Nah." Wilson rests his chin against the heel of House's hand, half-closes his eyes. "It's not displaced. Nothing much they can do except give me pain pills. I'll take some Tylenol and live with it."

House thumbs the ungrazed portion of his partner's chin, studies him carefully.

"Don't suffer on my account. If you need something stronger, we'll go get it."

"No, no, it's—"

"Safer not? If I'm going to slip, I can do it on anything. Tylenol. Ibuprofen. Acetaminophen. Yeah, Vicodin's yummiest, but I'm an addict not a one-vice pony."

His frankness makes Wilson pull a face, but he doesn't try to pretend he wasn't thinking it.

"I don't want to make it harder for you. I wasn't addicted to booze, but it's still habit to drink it if it's there. You've got a medical _reason_—"

"And a reasonable—" _ish_ "—medication regime. I do physical therapy now, massages without the happy ending, Jacuzzi sessions. I've even got some guy turning my leg into a pincushion a couple of times a week." He taps the cooling hot pack. "I'm handling my pain. You can medicate yours."

Wilson half-smiles, that funny proud kind of smile that House realises he's always wanted to earn.

"I'm really okay," he promises, holds up a hand before House can do more than roll his eyes. "If it gets worse, I'll get a script."

"You're still going to have a big ass bruise."

"It'll settle down before Monday." Wilson's sigh is jaded. "I heal fast."

Outside, the clouds mass like frown lines on the face of the restless dusk. In the gathering dimness, House takes his hand and the ice away from Wilson's face long enough to reach for the switch of the side lamp. He relights the room in a bald bright yellow slash.

"Just tell me you showed Daddy Dearest how much he taught you with a flying left hook to the hooter."

Wilson sighs. His gaze slinks down to track the swirls of cream on the fat brown silk cushions.

"Of course I didn't."

"Why the hell not?"

House gestures, emphatically but imprecisely, with the icepack. Chilly drops splatter across both of their chests. Wilson shivers.

"You'd raise a hand to your father, would you?"

He palms his jaw, wincing at the very idea. House passes him back the ice, points out:

"I proved to my father that my mother had had an affair and that I wasn't even his son when I was twelve years old. By the time I could have hit him back, I didn't have to."

Wilson lets that go with a reluctant nod. House's Jewdar kicks in; his brow crawls with a suspicious frown.

"This is some honour thy father crap, isn't it?"

"It is," Wilson admits, "And it isn't. Look, whatever you think of my values, standing up to my father was never an option. He was a powerful man right up until I left for college. The odds weren't exactly on my side. Sometime between then and graduation, he became an old man. It's too late now. I can't."

House contemplates the darkening bruise on his partner's cheek. It is not, to his mind, the work of an aging and defenceless pensioner. Any young thug who set upon Dr. Ira Wilson for his wallet and cell phone would find himself hospitalised and humiliated in the local news.

He remarks dryly: "It's never occurred to you that you putting his nose in a sling might be exactly what he was gunning for?"

Wilson does that tiny jump, the same twitching of facial muscles and silent double-take that he did when House pointed out that he must be his father's favourite. Then the clouds that slant across the window seem to cross his face too.

"If it is, I'm going to keep disappointing him." His voice shifts from flat to sardonic. "It's okay. I've got _really_ good at it."

"Damnit, Wilson!" House thumps the couch cushion between them before he can stop himself. "He sets you up to knock you down! Can't you see that?"

He startles himself as Wilson seizes his hand, pins his fist to the leather. The grip is tight, but not hurting, imploring: _Don't. Please don't._ House sucks in a deep breath and curls his tongue inside his mouth, imagines he is swallowing a pill. Do chill pills actually exist? If so, he goddamn needs one. That or an hour in a locked room with Ira Wilson. Canes at dawn.

Wilson's shaking his head, his frown a patented and patronising _I know better_ one, but his voice like that of a little boy's.

"He's not setting me up. He's just giving me chances to do better than I've done in the past. I have to—" Wilson breaks off abruptly as House twists his hand over, interlocking their fingers and squeezes back, the same silent code. He swallows the end of his sentence and his voice changes, grows grave and tired: "I have to stop thinking about it like this, don't I?"

"You have to get your ass on Skype and talk to your shrink more often, yeah."

Wilson breathes out slowly, strokes the back of House's hand with his thumb.

"Okay. _Okay_." He sighs, then tries to manufacture a smile. "Thanks. You know, sometimes you're actually good for me."

House snorts.

"Once more with feeling there, sport."

Wilson's smile twists sheepishly.

"Sorry, I just…" He lowers the icepack and plumps it in his palm. He's quiet for a while, staring at it, as if the ice offers some sort of counterweight in the scale as he weighs up something else to say. Finally, he settles the ice back against his skin and admits: "This wasn't the worst of today."

The room grows cold, the soft chatter of the ice shifting in the cloth reminds House of baths outside in a snow-filled tub, his head forced under the water. He tastes soap between his teeth, reviving the curses it is supposed to cleanse. His skin burns under the harsh sun as he stands to attention in an empty barracks. Then he's on his knees, locked in the dark under the steps, his only company the spiders that scuttle down his neck and the hunger cramps in his belly. Next, a wilderness opens up, an abandoned wasteland, nothing but sky, bugs croaking and a warning that he'll think twice about cheeking anyone after he's found his way home. He slams a mental door hard on the memories, tries to think of what Wilson's father used to do instead.

He near snarls when he realises: "Where else are you hurt?"

Wilson stares at a fat gleaming teardrop that falls from the icepack and splats onto his chinos, turns the soft cream cotton black. He gives his head a slight shake, as if he too must now banish the recollection of falls that weren't, of doors biting into jambs and fingertips, of carpet burn on his knees…

"Only inside."

"Inside, _where?_" House's voice rings like drawn steel; reflexively, he charts battle plans in corrosive humour. "Are we talking broken ribs? Bleeding kidneys? A striped hiney? Or," he's nearly spitting, physically shaking, as he forces out: "bad touching in your special place?"

Wilson's head jolts up. He wields a forefinger like a pistol.

"_No!_ No, and don't you _ever_ suggest that again. My father's not—it was _never_ that kind of abuse."

The percussive resonance of pure rage thrumming in House's skull slightly relents.

"At least you admit this _is_ abuse."

"Hey! I love my father, but I'm not a _complete_ idiot," Wilson protests. "I know what he does to me." He licks his lips and lowers the ice. His fingers tentatively map the swollen topography of his face. "I _meant_ that he hurt my— I meant …"

The word _feelings_ is still taboo when pride and masculinity are down for the count. Wilson tosses the ice onto the table and the words out with it, as if feigning casualness can make him cease to care.

"I mean, he asked me if I was going to tell him I couldn't keep a marriage together not because I'm an oncologist or because I've never learned to man up, but because I'm not even that way inclined."

He shudders, as if he wishes he could shed his whole skin and emerge someone new.

"So you told him you were prancing in the rainbow parade and you left."

Wilson reapplies the icepack, not so accidentally covering his mouth with his fingers as he mutters:

"Well, I left."

In the scheme of things, it shouldn't matter. House has already figured out that his partner is a regular Beelzebub when it comes to the war at home; being the master of lies seems to be all that's kept him out of a coffin. But it needles him, deeply, in some way he can't quantify that Wilson would put himself through hell without even laying claim to his reasons for it. That he'd chance bringing House down again too, without ever owning that he is, in part, why he did it in the first place. Is that how things are? Is he, House, simply not worth as much to Wilson as his knuckle-dusting next of kin? Or – and House hates himself for even allowing the thought to cross his mind – is the man right and his son won't follow through because he's simply too much of a goddamn coward?

"Why?"

The word comes out all ground up and almost spat.

Wilson shoots him a ducking look; then shakes it off and says strongly:

"Surely you understand. I can't drop a bombshell like that and just walk out the door! It wouldn't be the end of it. No matter what _I_ do, _they_ won't cut _me_ off." He raises a hand before House can speak, sneer, really, so it's just as well. "I know. I know it looks to you like I'm not even giving it a shot. But I know them. It's going to make things worse. It's not just my parents and my brothers; it's everyone else. If I try some thank you and goodnight riff I'm going to have every uncle, aunt, in-law and cousin turning up on my doorstep with pasta dishes and polemics about family duty and bonds."

House scoffs, not at all kindly. He's had the odd bitching out by his mom's sister, his father's mother, and some other relatives whose Christmas card addresses he long ago forgot.

"Numbers change: both streets and phones."

Is that thunder beginning in the distance or Wilson's voice that drops to an ominous rumble in the room?

"I am sick of moving, House. I've had it with hide-and-seek games. It didn't work with you and it's not going to work with them. They'll turn up at work, at conferences, at the convenience store. Even if I _don't_ tell them why I'm estranging myself, sooner or later it's going to come out that I cut them all off because of _us._"

_There._ That. Exactly what he'd feared. House is amazed at how mildly his voice comes out.

"And then comes the soup and the sermons. And the pamphlets from JONAH on the cures for that twenty-first century epidemic of homosexuality."

"Exactly."

Relief crosses Wilson's face prematurely; House isn't finished.

"But that's not your problem, is it? It's got jack to do with screwing up family values. You've borne Daddy's displeasure for the sake of taking three wives. You just won't do it for _me._"

Without moving an inch, Wilson seems to withdraw to the far side of the couch. His tongue sweeps across his lips, whets the red carpet to stage attractive lies. Then his eyes shudder closed and he speaks tentatively, truthfully, instead:

"Singly and collectively our relationship track record is mud. If this doesn't work out between us and I've cut them off, I'll be completely alone. I've done that House. I did that to get through rehab and it _sucked_. I don't ever want to do it again."

That goes right to the bone. House is on his feet with a sneer of wounded rage:

"Oh, so this _is_ just rebound, then?"

"NO!"

Wilson vaults up too and between one blink and the next they're squaring up, blocking each other's exit, shouting in each other's faces.

"Bull_shit_!"

"The hell it is! _House – _oy Gotenyu – I want this to work! But look at us! You _know_ what we are, what we've done to each other – what we're inches away from doing to each other again!"

Bruised face flushed, fists balled, Wilson drags in a deep breath and forces himself to take a step back. He swipes his hand through his hair and lowers his voice. It reverberates with the strain of self-control as he continues:

"Look, we've got to be realistic here. This might not work, however hard we try. And if it doesn't…I can't lose everything, irredeemably. It goes against everything I'm trying to do."

Choking on his own injured ire, House listens. But, not for the first time, he knows what it is to truly hate his partner. Wilson's sounds sober and sadly honest, his words full of wishes and wisdom. All it amounts to is that he isn't willing to go all in, to take the chance they so badly need. It means that, as always, he, House, just isn't good enough.

"Screw you, Wilson," he says coldly. "Screw you all the way to hell."

He snatches up his cane, swings on his heel and slams out of the front door.

TBC…


	21. Chapter 21

_Once again, a huge thank you to everyone who left feedback and to whom I couldn't respond personally! :D_

* * *

The heavens open as the door closes. A deluge of water descends, so hard and sudden that House never notices his cheeks were streaked wet before the rain came. The chill and the hurt snatch his breath away. He can hardly believe it's come to this: another flammable fight that washes out on the doorstep. Wilson's safe within; he's alone outside.

His knees falter at the next step, threaten to fail; he wants to buckle, to sink onto the stoop, shut his eyes and turn his face up to the rain. Let it come. Let it rain until he dissolves or Wilson weakens, comes running with some wet-rag wimpish promise that he'll never fulfil…

No. _No._ Not again. _Never_ again.

Limbs stiff, as if his joints have fused together under too much heat and too much pressure, House physically shoves himself away from the doorframe. Every footfall aches as he limps down the steps. Each dose of rain makes him trap the need to gasp behind pinched lips. But he _will_ go. He will _not_ back down. He can't. This is how it starts. The bad stuff. The worst stuff. The power plays, undermining each other, accepting less and pushing for more than either one of them can give. This is their collision course: House charges in too deep; Wilson wheels away whenever the wind blows.

It's blowing now, slaps House's face scarlet. He grits his teeth, forges forward into it. Each gusty smack is a reprimand for his desire to turn back. He's better off out here, where the weather can beat some sense into him. He's not good enough for Wilson. But the rain is not so discerning.

_You don't value yourself enough, Greg. How do you expect others to?_

The question lances through his head with the first jag of lightning. For a split-second, the shadow of a stocky streetlight seems to coalesce, tricks his brain into seeing black skin and a dark suit beside slickly shining paintwork: the figure of his shrink leaning against his Repso.

_Go to hell._ House retorts fiercely. _Go directly to hell. Do not pass go. Do not stiff me for another two hundred dollars._

The question waits, graffitied on the inside of his skull; instead of the listening wallpaper he's supposed to be Nolan's a closet interior decorator, redesigning House's brain. He realises he's stalled on the sidewalk, as if his psychiatrist is really waiting in the pouring rain for him to face up to some truth he's missed and doesn't want to see.

Why the would hell that man – shrink, psychic, telekinetic, spirit of House's psychotic head-space – discourage him from leaving right now? Nolan had near blown a gasket when he'd heard House was getting back with his old partner – if blowing gaskets had become a sombre disappointed sigh instead of a piss-poor magic trick where the engine disappears in bang and a permanent puff of smoke. Feeling tripped out, sans the Vicodin, House casts a dizzy glance back at the tall walls of the apartment with its warmly lit windows. _No. Fuck this. Fuck Nolan too._

Shaking it off, House strides on. Inside his head, he silently retorts:

_You're wrong. I don't devalue myself. I'm a better doctor than you._

_We're not talking about your profession, Greg. Your professionalism may sometimes be in question, but your abilities are not. I'm asking about you. Not the medicine, the man._

Of course he is. Bastard. Two years hard slog hasn't made House care for this searching for his soul through his navel nonsense at all.

_I'm hot, handsome, way funnier than you are. I'd do me._

_Try that again without the sarcasm._

He can't and they both know it. Instead, he delves viciously in his pocket for his bike keys, seizes one slimy rubber-grip handlebar.

_Well, Greg?_

He hops in a puddle, saturated sneakers squelching like organs. He swings his gamy leg over the sodden seat, snaps his cane into the clips on the bike's side, and rams the keys into the engine.

_You are right, Greg. So tell me: what isn't good enough about that?_

House flings a last helpless look back over his shoulder at the home where, yet again, he no longer belongs.

_I don't know. I don't _care_. Ask them. Ask _him_._

_Ask who_, _House?_

Hold it. Nolan never called him…

_"House!_"

Thunder and the apartment door clap. House twists another glance over his shoulder, finds Wilson dashing down the slippery steps. He grabs for the keys, makes the engine bellow.

_Ask_ him.

But Nolan has gone silent. Wilson yells:

"WAIT!"

_No chance._ House revs the engine. Wilson puts on a burst of speed that he'd never used to have. His damn gym addiction's paying dividends; before House can kick the stand down and zoom off, Wilson sprints to the head of the bike. He leaps out in front of it and holds out one hand. It isn't upraised, a frantic plea for House not to go at all. It's nothing so romantic. Dangling from Wilson's closed fist is House's forgotten helmet.

The fibreglass is black, but House immediately sees red. Of course. Typical Wilson. He'll throw himself in front of a vehicle to keep House out of harm's way; but it's nothing personal; he'd do it for a bum on a street corner too. The limitations on his capacity to care tighten House's grip on the throttle. Wilson's always been all gesture and no follow-through. Sure, he doesn't want House dead; but he doesn't really want him in his life either. Whatever _he_ may think of that, to House it's pretty much the same thing.

He revs the engine until it drowns out roar of the rain on the buildings. Wilson pales but stands his ground; House realises he'll have to knock him to it to get past him. He loosens the brake a little and the bike jolts on the spot, not so much a threat as a promise. As House did in the lounge, Wilson simply raises his chin. A sharp toss of his head flings a dripping slab of hair out of his eyes, the action unconsciously reminiscent of a shampoo advert.

Which one of them is worth it: the possible RTA fatality, the jail cell? House might care if he thought for a second it was him. It's not. It can't be. If he mattered that much, Wilson wouldn't just stand up _to_ him he'd stand up _for_ him. Or – hell – he'd at least admit House can stand up for _himself_. Given the chance he'd stand up for _both _of them. He'd clash horns with Wilson's father for the sake of them in a heartbeat. Denied that, he hurls himself off his bike for one last clash with Wilson.

"Don't want my death on your conscience, is that it?"

He snatches his helmet from his partner's hands and hurls it across the road. Reinforced fibreglass skims past Wilson's shoulder, _thwacks_ into the sidewalk. A bright flash and a clatter herald the escape of his apartment keys, tucked inside and forgotten. They spin glittering across the pavings and scurry into the gutter. House hardly notices. Fists readied for this to go down the way it always did, he hawks up and hurls all his ire and inadequacy into Wilson's face.

"Don't strain something giving a damn here, _buddy_. I'm not your down and out charity case best friend any more! You don't have to care about me because no one else does. You may have done a damn good job breaking my bones but the rest of me was broken long before you came on the scene and – you know what? – I fixed myself up without you.

"I don't _need_ you anymore, Wilson. And I sure as hell don't need this. I spent over half my therapy time trying to figure out what's wrong with me, why I'm never good enough for you, never _normal_ enough. I came up with a hundred answers. I'm a guy. I'm not Jewish. I'm smarter than you are. I don't jump through hoops just 'cause people expect it. But you know what I never did? I never asked the right question. So here it is. I want to know. _What the hell is wrong with_ _**you**__?"_

He's shaking as he finishes, great furious breaths that burn in his chest like sobs. Why, _why_, is the only person's opinion that ever mattered the one who can never respect him? Why is the one man that House has ever loved without condition the same one who finds it impossible to do the same? Why, why,_ why_ is he still standing here instead of half-way home and as many miles as he can get away from his own kind of revamped childhood hell?

Wilson stares at him. The handlebars of the bike are between them and the antennae-like mirrors show the view behind House of the wind-wrecked street: an over-turned dumpster has scattered broken glass and rags of litter; the apartment door, unfastened, clatters back and forth frenetically. Wilson's breath too catches, tears from his lungs as though he could howl with rage and dismay.

"Not good enough for me, House?" His voice comes faint, shocky and faraway, nothing like the antagonised holler that House was expecting. Wilson shakes his head, the rain turning a little of the dried blood on his lip back to liquid that trickles down his chin. "_I_ was the one I thought wasn't…"

He breaks off, tongues the inside of his lower lip, as though he's literally searching inside his head for something to say.

"I don't know where you're getting that," he manages finally, sounding so blind, deaf and dumb that House wants to shake him. "I don't know how to fix your self image or mine. But if I ever make you think you weren't worthy of me, of being loved, House, I am so, so, sorry."

"Oh, _shut up._"

Sick of that word, infuriated by how little it ever seems to change between them, House throws his leg back over his bike. Screwed up self-image is among the many reasons his shrink listed when explaining to him why partners in abusive relationships – especially ones that had escalated to the level of theirs – can rarely overcome old patterns and behaviour. Having failed on all counts himself tonight and unable to recognise a mirror of his own inferiority complex in Wilson, he guns the engine and swings the wheel. He doesn't feel the tyre graze Wilson's knee, only sees him throw up empty hands and back out of the way. Gut twisting with the belief that his choice to leave has just become Wilson's order, House lets go of the brake. He tears off like a bat out of hell, determined not to see the sudden curve of the road until it's way too late…

* * *

He's disappointed when he makes it home unscathed. Finding himself safely kerbside in front of 221B Baker Street, House shuts off the bike, drops the kickstand, and gives the rear tyre a mean little boot with his sneaker to say thanks for nothing. The rain has eased on his wild drive over. He tugs his cane off the clips on the bike's side and limps up the rutted steps to the green front door amidst a heavy but exhausted pattering from above.

His apartment building is one of the oldest in the city. Nine out of ten times the sticky catch on the main entrance doors doesn't close properly and he's got used to pushing it open without thinking, being surprised by the odd occasion it requires unlocking. It rasps open this time too and he's hobbled to his own front door before he recalls the enraged crack of his helmet and the clatter of keys discarded onto concrete.

Dripping onto his own welcome mat, House lets his forehead fall forward against his door with a muffled groan. His phone's in his jeans pocket, but the directory with useful things like numbers of twenty-four hour locksmiths is inside. The elevator to the upstairs apartments is out of action and, between the call girls and the late night jam sessions, the three years of bullfighting with Wilson, the EMT call-outs and the cop break-ins, he's made no friends among his neighbours. Cold, tired and aching from head to foot, he twists himself around to lean all his weight against the wall while he contemplates what to do.

The choices frankly suck. He can sag down onto the thistle-like bristles of the doormat, prop his shoulder against the doorframe and sleep here, deal with tomorrow when it comes. But it won't come soon enough. He's soaked to the core and every drop that trickles from his hair to splash on his cheek feels too much like tears for him to bear. The nerves in his leg are sparking with their own brewing storm of pain and tension too; his pills – now restricted to scheduled times – are inside. That leaves… He glares down at his bike keys, wonders if there's enough fuel left in the tank, if he should call ahead.

In the end, he decides it doesn't matter. He drags himself to the front door again, resolves to simply turn up on Cuddy's porch and say:

"Yeah, okay. You told me so."

TBC…


	22. Chapter 22

_Thank you, once again, to all the amazing reviewers who have taken the time to send me lots of lovely words of encouragement! (P.S: For those of you wondering why there was so many chapters from House's pov, the last three are all one. Because of LJ posting lengths, I had to break the chapter down into parts, but I figured everyone would rather have the updates immediately than wait and have the whole chapter together :)  
_

* * *

**Chapter Seventeen**:

He shouldn't've come. He knew that as soon as he'd pelted back out into the rainstorm. But, really, where else was he going to go? He couldn't have stayed home. Studying the chipped green paint on the locked front door, he turns the handful of spare keys over in his pocket and wonders whether he should unlock it and go in or just post them through the brass box and stay away. _Coward_ an all too familiar voice taunts him. He raises his hand to knock, then wonders if, for once, spinelessness might actually be a good thing. Letting his hand fall, Wilson sighs and sits down on the edge of the puddle that has accumulated on House's doorstep.

The door opens with a jerk less than five minutes later. Wilson glances up over his shoulder in time to see House start and stub his toe. After a hair-raising drive, where he was afraid every second of finding the Repso wrecked and his partner crumpled bleeding in a heap but not once did he catch sight of House's bike on the slick black streets, something tight and cramped in Wilson's belly loosens; House is upright and uninjured, if sullen. He scrambles to his own feet, expects another rollicking. But it doesn't come. House stares at him. His glassy eyes reflect Wilson's own uncertainty and indecision back at him.

The pause pressures him and he speaks first, a feeble:

"Hey."

House's expression doesn't change. His silent stare is that of a stranger's. But Wilson knows him, knows the tells of exhaustion, betrayal, bitterness and harshly repressed hope. House seems to have aged years in a matter of minutes. The lines on his face appear deeper, magnified by the trickles of water tracking down them. His bowling shirt hangs heavily from his slumped shoulders. His weight lists to the left and he sets his jaw, looks determinedly over Wilson's shoulder.

"I came to bring you these," Wilson explains, when it's clear that House can hold it together only by not acknowledging him. He roots in the pocket of the jacket he threw on over his wet polo shirt, holds out the forgotten keys. "You left them on the sidewalk with your helmet. That's in the car, by the way. But I know your leg's bad tonight and you're upset and the only place you'd want to be right now is here, so…"

He tails off as House holds out his hand, spills the keys uncomfortably into the open palm. Is that it? Should he walk away? After all they've gone through, it seems crass. But it would be cruder still to ask the obvious question. Shouldn't he know by now when it's over?

He reaches into his pocket again, edges around the issue.

"I, um…" His airway shrinks. For a moment he can't breathe, can't complete the sentence. He wants to apologise again, to beg House to admit his walkout was blowing off steam rather than blowing them apart; he doesn't even care how pathetic he will sound. But _sorry_ has become House's bugbear and he daren't say it. They're both already triggered and 221B is their old boxing arena. At last, he simply holds out his own set of keys to the apartment. "I thought you might want these back too."

House's apparent fixation with a hanging basket, rocking in the last of the breeze by the door of the house opposite, falters. His attention dips down into Wilson's palm. His jaw locks tighter. His own hand is still held out, but Wilson sets his teeth too and keeps the keys dangling from his own fingers. He won't just give in and give them to him. This is House's choice; he has to take them. _He_ has to be the one to take this last chance away from them.

It's a bitch of a thing to do and Wilson knows it. But he can think of no other way to prove that his unwillingness to lose everything does _not_ mean he's willing to lose House.

It is a terrible, trembling, interminable moment, before House closes his fist. He pockets only his own keys and says shortly:

"You thought wrong."

They sit down side by side on the doorstep, separated by the dull pool of water gathered in the deep groove worn by too many years of being trodden underfoot. The street in front of them is glossy. A light rain continues to fall. Wilson can feel House eyeing him sidelong. He's taking stock of him, notes the unwitting influence of himself that Wilson has only just realised is branded on his person.

His cream chinos are soaked to his legs, the cotton grey from sitting in the gritty puddle. Over his casual polo shirt, he wears the first jacket he grabbed off the pegs when he ran back for his car keys. It's black leather with red chevrons on the upper arms; the twin of House's own. It was a gift, an attempt to con him into one day risking his neck on that two-wheeled death machine that House adores and Wilson dreads. He can only imagine what he looks like: a cut-and-shut between a Hell's Angel and a loafer-wearing geeky guardian one. It's a collateral identity forged by their headlong crash into one another. He realises, with a sudden hard thud of his heart, that it's the closest he's ever come to understanding if not who he is then at least who he is happiest to be.

"I love you."

He says it as he feels it, voice abrupt and shaky with an overload of emotion.

House thumps his cane tip against the edge of the next step under their feet, answers flatly, without hesitation:

"I love you too."

There's no relief to it; if anything all the anger and upset is more intense than before. Wilson closes his eyes under the weight of it, wonders if it will ever go away.

"I am _so_ scared."

House coughs, mutters under his breath: "Right back at you."

Wilson can't help but cast him a sidelong, surprised look. He knows, rationally, that House is often afraid. The risks he takes with other people's lives, even with his own, he's not fool enough not to understand them, to be terrified by them – and worse by the alternatives. But he rarely lets on. Even when Wilson used to knock him flat on the mat, he always felt like he himself was the one who was more afraid. He'd be dizzy and blood-deafened by what he'd just done. House would just clamber back to his feet, spit hard on the carpet and make some daunting gesture of _bring it on_.

Expression fading against that little role-call of logic and intimate understanding, Wilson finds his eyes drawn to the glitter of the street number on the wall a little above and beside House's head.

"I don't know if we can live like this though," he says reluctantly, rueing the sense that he has cornered House into a heart-to-heart, into retracting his disgusted exit only to question whether – keys or no keys – there's a way into anywhere they want to be. "For everything I do right, I seem to do a dozen things wrong. Sometimes I feel like I'm hurting you worse than I ever did before. I know I keep letting you down."

House cants a look at him; after everything that has gone down, it is oddly kind.

"I'm not your father."

Wilson twists one corner of his mouth gravely.

"I'm more concerned that I remind you of yours."

House's brow flickers with a brief frown.

"Which one? The spare the rod, spoil the son, Colonel who thinks I'm mired in self-pity and need a good shaking or the Reverend Captain of the God-Squad who's so devout he knocked up a married woman?"

Wilson tries not to sigh at the false humour, knows there is as much truth in his concern as he feared.

"They're not characters in a Dicken's novel, House. Show a little respect. Your biological father sounds incredible. I read his book while I was in Horizons. I know you dismiss it as god stuff, but his mind…you have to go back to Saint Augustine to find that kind of vision, courage, comprehension – and sense of humour – in the field. If I thought I were like that, like you—"

"You wouldn't accept it." There's no judgement in the statement; it's simply fact. "You can't accept me, because you can accept the parts of you that are like me."

"You mean…" Wilson's mouth bows in a mixture of regret and cynicism. "I let myself down."

"Stop that." House's voice sharpens. "Stop projecting your father onto me. I'm not yours and you're not mine. You're not the Colonel, I mean. You only try to stop me screwing up when I'm _really _screwing up, not just because I see the world differently or because I want to take a stand on something—"

Wilson cuts in, understanding: "You hate me most not when we disagree, but when you know I'm right."

House stiffens, but he recognises the instant resistance he seems to feel as an affirmation of truth and grudgingly nods. Wilson slowly joins in.

"You're not my father either, House. I do know that. I guess we've got to do a better job of holding on it.

House turns that over.

"Nothing wrong with us," he decides. "Something's wrong with them."

"Yeah," Wilson seconds, though they both knew that already. "But you've sworn you'll only talk to a corpse and my father's about as good a conversationalist on that subject, so it doesn't much help us. Anyway, we can't change _them_."

House frowns at the implication.

"There is no need to keep trying to change ourselves, either."

Wilson looks away, starts when House seizes his shoulder, gives it a shake – not angry but demanding, urging him to look back.

"_Trust_ me. Trust _me_. You don't have to have all the answers."

Wilson ceases to retreat. He studies the gentle clasp House has on his upper arm, but cannot stop himself from shaking his head. He does. He _does_. House's father is of a different stamp to his, of a mind that any error is obvious, needs only reprimand, not explanation. He can't imagine the sort of interrogations that Wilson's specialises in: making him work out, spell out, every aspect of his failings so that he knows exactly what it is for when the inevitable blow falls. His mother, for all her intended kindness, is much the same: asking more questions, setting up more guessing games, making him figure out his father's motives, and forcing him into the older man's shoes until he can't even find his own any more. Then there are his brothers too: Danny, who looks to him for translation; David, who always knows better. How can he stand up to them all for House when he can't even stand up for himself?

When he speaks, though, Wilson mentions none of that. It's old news and there's so much more history that weighs upon his shoulders.

"I've been in three terrible marriages. I was only ever good enough when I had all the solutions, all the answers. When I didn't, if I needed hel—anything for myself, that's when it ended."

House met him after the first, had a front row seat for the train wrecks of the second and third. He nods, without any sign of surprise.

"You ever ask?" he points out. "Or did you run and hide in my pants?"

Wilson grimaces. House seems to think that the truth, however brutal, is some kind of ritual cleansing, an atheist's Yom Kippur and its Erev: a kind of apology to all and a _tabula rasa_. Wilson often thinks of it as a crucifix: a bitch to carry and a kind of fatality. So often, too often, it is gentler to lie and then ask forgiveness than tell the truth and hope for it.

Between them, though, that has never worked.

"I don't know," he says quietly. "I guess…maybe I hoped…I—" His tongue skitters across his teeth, pushes the admission past them. "I think I wanted someone to know me well enough to _notice_ without being told."

The soft snort is expected. The hand that slides down into his is not. Unexpectedly, there's no jibe about gender reassignments, Houses simply weaves their fingers together and closes the grip with the deft expertise of one shutting a wound with sutures.

"I'm not one of your ex-wives, either," he says firmly. "Don't hide from me, Wilson. If I don't see it when you need something, come _home._"

Wilson chafes lightly at the grip, nails scuffing back and forth across House's skin like a lad kicking stones along a gutter. Since House hasn't obliged, he scolds himself for being a sentimental fool.

"What, I should come running to you like a child with a boo-boo?"

His voice still anticipates ridicule. House searches out his skittish gaze, steadily stares down the dread and the doubts.

"Oh," Wilson says.

He has to look away for a few seconds, swallow hard. There's a horrible, hovering moment before he slowly unwinds their grip, then stretches his arm across the centre divide. He loops it around House's neck, leans over on his chilly perch and settles his head on House's shoulder. When House snakes his own arm between Wilson's back and the doorframe, cinches it around his waist, Wilson lets out a breath that he seems to have been holding for decades. He turns his face into House's shoulder and nods. His voice comes out soft, squeezed tight with emotion.

"Just swear you'll never make me figure out the other person's side of it."

"No way." House squeezes back. "You're already too good at that for you _own_ good. Anyway, I'm on yours."

"And when it's us?"

The question is reluctant but it has to be asked.

"There's got to be an 'our' side, right?"

A soft chuckle escapes unexpectedly.

"God, I hope so."

House tips his head sideways to rest it against the top of Wilson's wet head.

"You _are_ in this, aren't you?"

Wilson snorts softly in turn. "You're only _just_ figuring that out?"

* * *

The rain has almost stopped when House reopens the door to the apartment and leads the way across the threshold. The storm has not yet abated, but it has moved further away. Starting to shiver in his wet clothes, Wilson sets the percolator going for hot coffee, while House limps stiffly to the bathroom. He returns, shirtless, carrying a set of dry towels. Wilson takes one gratefully, rubs at the sopping floppy mess the rain has made of his hair.

He finds himself self-conscious about disrobing. For all his daily runs and regular bouts on the tennis courts have trimmed and toned the middle age paunch he'd been developing before his rehab, the bruise on his back and the graze on his elbow where he staggered into the living room wall at his parents' place make him feel juvenile, weak, pathetic. House, stripping down quickly and padding about naked in search of his black sweat pants and a white t-shirt, is all taut strength, endurance and maturity.

Wilson's discomfort is not helped by the memories of House's unshakeable pride whenever he himself had left similar brands of displeasure on that long lean frame or by the furtiveness with which he feels he has to sneak looks at his partner. They were so close to hurting each other again less than half an hour before that he feels they should keep physical distance now, makes sure the couch stays between them. He discards his jacket onto a chair back, keeps his chilly clothes on as he goes to pour out the coffee.

House has unearthed a spare pair of Wilson's jeans and his favourite grey pit-stained McGill sweater when he returns. Wilson exchanges coffee for clothes, mutters an excuse and steps out. He uses the toilet and changes behind the safety of the bathroom door. When he returns the television is on and House is sprawled on the couch, his bad leg propped up on the coffee table, idly chewing a mouthful of analgesics he's supposed to swallow. The illusion that he can forget his own fury as easily as he could ignore Wilson's at the other apartment leaves Wilson feeling, as he so often does, as though he's missed several steps in this path they're beating.

He crosses to the wingchair, feels his way forward cautiously, pretending to observe the little symbols of clearing skies appearing on the neon green map of Princeton whilst surreptitiously eyeing the unreadable slackness of House's features in the screen's phosphorescent glow. At length, he ventures:

"You know, we haven't really resolved anything."

House purses his lips, swills a mouthful of air from side to side and spits it out with a sigh, though he'd known this was coming.

"Oh goody. More talking. You know, I think I miss it when it was just sex and smacking each other around."

Wilson half-circles his eyes toward a crack in the ceiling, flexes his swollen jaw trepidatiously. Pain shots through it, right into the roots of his teeth, up his nose and across his forehead. He grimaces, bites his tongue on a yelp and says:

"Yeah, well, not tonight, dear; I have a headache."

House snickers, but Wilson doesn't miss the pass of his hand over his thigh in silent accord. Whilst he's promised to keep this particular problem between himself and his new specialist, Wilson can't help but wonder if "managing" his pain might have been putting things too strongly. House's temper is always shorter when he's really hurting. Then again, his pain is usually worse when he's upset…

"I'm not not telling them because of _you_, you know," Wilson blurts out, hoping to salve some of the aching awkwardness he feels between them. "I wish I hadn't told them about Julie. I'm not telling them any _more_ because it won't help to make a huge scene. The best I can do here is to let contact drift. You know, answer when they call, visit once in a while, but not phone in and pull the doctor card at holidays. It's easier all around if no one knows enough to get too involved, to get hurt."

House scrunches his forehead, says nothing. Mind riffling through fifteen years worth of knowledge of his partner, Wilson wonders if this kind of lie feels too much to House like dishonesty. He's got a yen for the good old conniving underhand lead-up lies that preface a big reveal, but a constant low-level deception that grinds people down? For House, his experience with that is with his Vicodin. That sort of lie winds up in rehab facilities, take parts of a person away, leave phantom aches and fears in payment. Wilson wonders how to explain that he finds the ghosts easier to deal with.

"Look what happens when I go home," he persists, softly persuasive. "If I could make a clean break, I might try it. But I can't. And _I_ don't need this," he gestures to his swollen face, "in my life anymore. I don't want to tell them about you, _us_, because I don't want you to be any part of _this_ any more. I want this side of us to be over. I want us to shut the door on it, leave it behind with the teddy bears and outgrown bikes and board games. Move on with monster trucks, Grand Theft Auto and TiVo nights, sulking on the couch when someone's mad, making up against whichever wall's nearest—"

"Yeah," House cuts in, abruptly. He glances over, frown settling into an expression that on anyone else Wilson might have called abashed. "I got there." Somewhere in one of his silences, he's been psychoanalysing Wilson too. "I should've figured you'd go around it this way."

Scared, Wilson tells himself again. House _was_ scared when he'd come in to Wilson's place, when he himself had got snappish, when he'd threatened to throw him out. He should've recognised sooner how many of House's own triggers he'd been pulling; the subsequent explosion had been inevitable. If he'd only turned in the bathroom and hugged House instead of verbally shoving at him, they could've avoided the whole row. He thinks of his dog, waiting patiently on the backseat of his car, and realises it would do him the power of good if he could get his head around the fact that Hippo is _not_ the only being in the world who loves him unconditionally.

"You know I need escape hatches," he affirms quietly. "You have to trust me that I'm not necessarily going to use them."

House shifts his attention from the TV, catches Wilson's eyes for a brief second in the blue glow of a commercial.

"You too," he says, with such seriousness that Wilson wonders if he's still got a box of morphine stashed somewhere or if he's finally found some other substitute that saves rather than ends his life.

In the name of trust, he doesn't ask. He excuses himself long enough to bring the dog in from the car, locate and set down a bowl of water for him, then joins House on the couch to let some dated Armageddon movie repair the peace between them.

* * *

The movie ends with House stretched out over most of the couch, slumped down, with his shoulders and head propped heavily against Wilson's chest. Though his breathing is still deep and uneven enough to suggest he's awake, his eyes are firmly closed. A faint snore bubbles at the end, exposes itself as a rumble from his belly. It occurs to Wilson that it's after midnight and, aside from a large packet of chips shared with the dog, none of them have eaten.

He's hungry, but not enough to fancy irritating House with an acknowledgement of his partner's erratic eating habits. It's another sign that House's pain management isn't working as well as it should. But that's none of his business any more. He has to have faith that House will sort it out with his specialist. Much as the remark stung, having had a few hours to reflect on it, he knows it's a good thing that House _doesn't_ need him any more. In the wake of their own personal apocalypse, House simply _wanting_ him doesn't feel like settling for less.

He wakes him reluctantly, dislodges Hippo from his foot, and takes the dog out into the street to pee while House hunts out his sleeping tablets, overnight analgesics, and sensibly takes them with a large glass of milk. When Wilson returns, he's perched on the couch back, yawning.

"Bed," he announces, over the pop-rip as Wilson opens a can of tuna, sniffs it dubiously, then empties it into the spare dog bowl that House has taken to keeping in the kitchen. Without waiting for an answer, he shambles off toward the bedroom.

Wilson, after a brief check to make sure that nothing unexpected has been dumped in the large red dog-bed by the mail table, starts to follow. But he checks himself at the start of the passageway, unable to internalise or overlook the evening's events as determinedly as House seems able to do.

"House?" he calls out, stopping his partner in the half-light of the narrow corridor.

House looks back over his shoulder, stifles another yawn.

"Yeah?"

"One more thing."

"Yeah?"

Wilson bites his lip, wishes he weren't the one always compelled to triple check the safety of their shared territory.

"You threw your helmet at me."

House's sleepy eyes flick away from his, through the open bathroom door toward the washing basket. He must've noticed the tyre stripe across the shin of Wilson's chinos when he took them away. His voice comes low, apologetic.

"Yeah."

"Yeah." Wilson weights it with the same kind of regret. "Look, I wish I could just let this go, but…this is the _only_ part of us that I'm ashamed of. I've had five, no, six long term relationships and none of them were ever like this I know my medical condition played a huge part, but…there's something about you and me that…I don't know. There's a very real possibility that we'll never be able to stop pushing each other's buttons. We can't undo what's already been done. We can't really forgive each other. We're never going to forget. All of that makes it very hard not to do it all over again."

"Yeah."

"What I'm saying is—"

"Wilson," House drags his name out; eyes suddenly hyper-alert, anxious. "Don't throw the towel in _now._"

He shakes his head, promises: "I'm not. I just…I need _you_ to be sure. This _is_ the cycle of violence, remember? We get mad, things go badly; we cool off, we make up. We were okay, this time. But if we have another fight like this one it might not end so well. We might not come out the other side."

House cocks a strange smile at him, at once grim and gently chastening.

"I knew that going in," he points out. "I'm still in."

Wilson nods, his heart somehow rendered both light and heavy. He licks his lips, says sombrely:

"There's an old Jewish saying: 'may God protect you from the things you can get used to.'"

He sees an inevitable quip rise to House's lips and blow away in his partner's quiet exhale. With a slight nod to acknowledge that House agrees, he adds:

"I'm going to sleep on the couch tonight."

Shades of concern scud across House's face, abandonment, hurt, sadness and…acceptance. He presses his lips together to trap any protest and nods, cedes to the sense in sleeping on the situation before they make any more promises about the future.

"You know where the blankets are," he says at last. Then, as if he can't help himself, "I'll see you in the morning?"

"Of course," Wilson vows. Then, to make sure House doesn't still take sense as a subtle hint that he's going to slip away, adds: "I'll make breakfast. If you've got nothing in the cupboard, I'll nip out to the store. D'you want macademia nut pancakes?"

A Puckish ghost gleams in House's eyes.

"Nope," he says and with a smugly fuck the world lilt announces: "_Bacon_."

Wilson chews on a smile, knows he was a slightly better Jewish boy before he started eating out with House, knows too that this is a private kind of tit-for-tat his partner is orchestrating against his unknowing father. So be it. He can get on board with that.

"Okay. Deal." Letting the smile loose for a brief moment, he turns toward the lounge. "G'night, House."

"Wilson?"

He pauses, looks back over his shoulder. "Yeah?"

"One more thing."

"Yeah?"

House studies him for a moment, as though he's picking his words carefully. Then, lightly, as if it means nothing at all, he points out:

"When I threw my helmet at you, you didn't react. You didn't even think about hitting me for it."

It means everything. Caught up in considering House's responses, in how he might have contributed to them, Wilson hadn't even registered his own _lack_ of responses.

"Yeah," he realises; then, staggered by a swell of surprise and relief: "_Yeah._"

"Yeah," House confirms, with a quick _catch-up-will-you?_ cant of his eyebrows. It turns into the faintest of smiles, at once mildly amused at Wilson's obliviousness and deeply proud. "G'night, Jim."

"Good night."

Unsure if he's smiling himself, but buoyed on a new tide of hope, Wilson gathers his blankets and goes to join his impudent dog on the couch.

TBC…


	23. Chapter 23

**I'm back. Sort of. Nearly. Trying to be. Back writing _Amends_ anyway. Thesis nearly over. Thanks for the encouraging messages and for your patience, folks!**

* * *

Wilson is ironing teabags when House crawls stiffly off the couch next morning. Neither one of them comments on his overnight migration, the shadows under Wilson's eyes from the long early hours spent knelt carefully astride House on the couch cushions massaging the pain spasms out of his neck, back and glutes, or the way the blankets were neatly tucked around House when he finally drifted off and the scribbled note left on the coffee table reminding him that Wilson hadn't bolted he'd nipped out to the store. Instead, bleary and yawning, House hobbles to the coffee maker, sniffs the remnants of grounds left in the filter paper, and switches it on.

"There's fresh in the freezer," Wilson remarks.

Behind him, bacon sizzles on the stove.

House merely grunts. It's been a while since he had a night as bad as this and the distance from the perc to the freezer to get the fresh coffee is more than he can face without caffeine and analgesics already in his system. He locates his pills in the cupboard and gulps the first of his doses down dry. When he's done, a gentle hand comes to rest on his shoulder. Wilson has switched off the iron, moved it away from the table; he guides House over to a chair and pushes him to sit.

"Let me?"

House caves without resistance. He's too wrung out to care that this has the resonance of another old ritual. Wilson's Judaism has certain upsides: he'll always try to make restitution for a row through cooking.

House lightens the atmosphere with a gruff: "You'd better. You promised me breakfast."

Wilson opens the door of the freezer, half-smiles over his shoulder.

"Well, I figured sex is still out."

A fleeting hesitance crosses his face, as if he's not sure it will ever be _in_ again. House discredits _that_ theory by snagging the sleeve of Wilson's clean lemon polo shirt as he passes, tugs insistently until he leans down low enough to be swiped with a bristly stale-breathed kiss.

"I could jump you right now."

Wilson chuckles, relaxes. He smells reassuringly of House's own brand of toothpaste and his shirt of those stupid drawer-fresheners that have taken over House's closet.

"Sure you could―hey!" He yelps as House hooks a foot around his ankle, threatens to topple him over the table and make good on it. Catching himself, Wilson actually grins. "Breakfast first, huh?"

It'll be breakfast only and they both know it. House is too sore and too tired to really follow through, but the familiarity of this pattern is growing easier for letting it unfurl. In spite of all the hurt and all the anger the night before, the light of day casts it in a different perspective. As fights go, this one is definitely packing its bags. The air feels clearer for the exchange of honesty rather than blows. It's no longer a matter of faking okay until they can make it okay; it's actually pretty close to _being_ okay, in spite of the issues still circling them like pachyderms.

"Breakfast if you're cooking it," he cedes at last. "Not pressing it into pleats or whatever you think you're doing here."

He eyes the neatly heat-sealed teabags dubiously.

"They're green tea mixes." Wilson snatches them away. "I've cut back on caffeine again; it's making my panic attacks worse."

House thieves one off him, sniffs it and wrinkles his nose.

"It's going to give Cuddy conniptions when you fall asleep in the department heads meeting today."

Wilson stifles a yawn and shoves the teabags in a tub, returns to the stove to poke the bubbling bacon.

"Tomorrow, House. It's only Sunday. Thankfully." He eyes his greening bruise in the reflective back of a wall-hung frying pan. "I think she'd be less concerned about me falling asleep than if I have a concussion and how I came by it."

"Fair point."

House surreptitiously checks the calendar stuck to the front of the fridge. Bad pain nights screw with his sense of time. It always seems improbable that only a matter of hours have passed. But Wilson's right. Rather than make use of the extra day's grace to pick through the wreckage of yesterday's disagreement he deflects:

"You off to the temple today?"

Wilson cants a puzzled look at him.

"Have you ever known me to?"

"Nope, but you're ironing teabags. On the scale of normal to total lifestyle conversion I think that comes after seeking the help of the Lord."

"Oh shut up." Wilson shoves the back of his head lightly on his way to answer the summons of the perc. "This is perfectly normal. It's standard medical guidance to use different diet and exercise regimes to make lifestyle changes. Anyway." He pours out and plonks House's coffee in front of him with a mischievous look. "What on earth would _you_ know about normal?"

House's first mouthful gets snorted across the table.

* * *

The bath is deep and just this side of too hot. House is immersed, the water lapping at his bottom lip, the scent of mineral oils thick in his nostrils. The knotted muscles in his back and thigh are loosening; the abrasive aches in his hip and the bones of his left foot from compensating slowly ebb. His emergency pills are nestled safely in the ring-shaped body of a rubber duck that wears a white cap with a red cross on it, an _I'm sorry_ gift Wilson had bought him several years ago. Distantly, he hears the front door close behind Wilson as he takes Hippo out for a morning constitutional. House reaches for the cell perched on the toilet seat and hits speed dial.

As soon as the call connects, he announces gleefully:

"Told you so."

"Ha-humph?"

There's a brief spluttering as face, pillow and too many dishevelled dark curls are disentangled. A bedside clock clacks as it is picked up, viewed, and replaced with a soft groan that acknowledges it's well past wake-up o'clock.

"Told me what?" Cuddy grumbles. "And don't make me guess. I spent yesterday babysitting my nephew and nieces. My biological clock is firmly on snooze and I'm out of lollipops to offer as bribery."

He chuckles at her exhausted honesty and reciprocates.

"Wilson and I had our first fight. Well, second. First not on the phone that is."

Satin covers whoosh as she bolts upright. There's a forced pause, before she says cautiously:

"Oh?"

"No casualties." He tries to ignore the relief in his voice and the little one reminding him of Wilson's damaged cheek. "Told you he was better."

"You did," Cuddy agrees, voice still teetering on the edge of neutral. "Are you okay?

House tells himself that he isn't trying to ascertain that too.

"Dandy. Did more damage to myself bowling with the ducklings. Quitting that team by the way. Leg doesn't play so well with others."

He hears her frown.

"It's been fine for the last ten months."

It hasn't.

"Wanna trade limbs for a while?"

"Nooo…" He can hear her uncertainty and the creak of the bed as she all too easily swings her own legs over the mattress edge, pads to the sash window to let in sunlight and birdsong. "You've just decided this?"

"It's not Wilson's idea, if that's what you're getting at."

Her silence is a yes.

"What was the fight about?"

He chews back a quip, reclines his head against the edge of the bath and recalls their slanging match.

"I was being me."

More silence. A slight chill from inside contends with the hot water surrounding him. Christ. She's even giving him the benefit of the doubt over that. Wilson's right about collateral damage. Were they real victims in this debacle of theirs? Or the people they both care about?

"I _was_. It was nothing new. Families versus fuck buddies. Commitment versus cold feet."

"Are you getting them?"

He shivers, imagines her doing so too, pulling her cream silk robe around her as if it's due not to dread that he isn't but to the draught from her window.

"No. Got a dog to lie on them now. Feet are all toasty."

"Is Wilson with you right now?"

Does she think he's standing over House, ordering him to speechify like this?

"He's walking said dog."

"So you just rang me to gloat?"

She's doubtful.

"Yup."

There's a pause, a chance for him to drop an end-of-call bombshell, to admit the real reason for ringing her. He doesn't think he has one.

"Did you call to reassure me?"

Himself. Both. Neither?

"I called to say I told you so."

"Okay." There's another pause, this one filled with unspoken psychobabble about trust. "Have a good day and I'll see you tomorrow."

"Yeah."

She doesn't hang up. He doesn't hang up. It's only when she ventures his name that he disconnects, replaces the cell on the closed lid of the toilet. He stares at it for several moments, trying to figure out what he should've said to convince her he's okay. He has the vague sense that, seven miles away, she's leaning against her wall, staring unseeing out of the window into the lilac bushes and contemplating redialling herself to ask one more time. Without knowing the answer to either question, he sinks down deeper into the soothing warmth of the water and nabs some of Wilson's froofy shampoo instead.

* * *

The water is cloudy with rinsed-off shampoo but still pleasantly warm when the front door reopens. With no inclination to move, House listens to the excited thud of paws circling on hardwood, the whack-whisk-whack of a long tail mapping the nearby walls and furnishings, then the _unk_-crunch-gulp of a snatched treat barely touching the sides of a joyfully salivating mouth. He wonders when he got comfortable having another person – and a pet – taking up half his space again.

The lead clicks as Wilson hangs it up with the coats; his shoes clunk as he toes them off and tucks them under the coffee table. The quiet pad of his socked footsteps approaching is drowned out by the splosh of water being urgently tongued into mini-tsunamis, half-swallowed, half-splattered across the kitchen tiles as Hippo reboots after a long morning's gambolling in whatever nearby greenery Wilson has managed to locate.

But the soft tick of his partner's knuckles against the bathroom door make House's stomach do a tuck. His conversation with Cuddy has rattled rather than reassured him, made him suspect she's right: that things aren't magically back to being all rainbows and unicorns between him and Wilson. Why should they be? There's so much resonance today with their primal past: the shouting-induced soreness in his throat; the lull of looseness in his ravaged thigh muscles that will turn into a spasm at the slightest attempt to stir; the olfactory overdose of cleaning products from Wilson's Suzy Homemaker stint before House awoke. That there's no blood to wash off the walls seems almost irrelevant. Something went down last night and, until the dust settles, he can't be sure if this they've managed to steer themselves in a new direction or if they're just taking the scenic route back around to that same old black eyes, bloodied noses, and broken bones circle of hell they dug out for themselves three years ago.

"House?"

For some reason, he'd figured Wilson would just come in, hadn't thought that he might wait for an answer, might feel some sense of uncertainty. He's not ready to put one of his shrink's boring acronyms to it, but, if Wilson's off-kilter too, then they've both got their own super-special brand of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome going on.

He bites the bullet and his tongue, then answers gruffly: "Yeah."

A floorboard pops as Wilson starts to move away, misreading taut invitation as _no, mother hen, I'm not drowning myself in scotch, shampoo and anticlimactic snivels, now scram_. The disorientating too-close, too-far, go away, come back, sensation scattering contradictory impulses through House's nervous system redoubles in intensity. Just what the hell is he spooked about? That Wilson will finally follow through and retaliate to that projectile helmet incident last night? Or that they won't know how to make it work _without_ being able to cut loose and cripple each other?

So much for that self-help mumbo-jumbo. That all important hop-step-numero-whatever on the road to recovery in which the victim grows a set and so becomes the victor, yada, yada, et ceterea, isn't all it's cracked up to be. Hell, it's just _cracked._ Knowing he's got it in him to call time if they do end up one ring below Dante's ninth has made him trip over his feet – and Wilson likewise, if he isn't much mistaken. If they're done taking the punches and the drive-by psychological shootings from one another, along with the rough, the smooth, his screwed up leg, Wilson's gym addiction, his random hold-ups of the Bank of Wilson and equally random splurges on matching light sabres, Monster Truck rallies, opera tickets and Pay per View, are they _done?_ Or just lost? The Here-be-Monsters regions of the map they've pretty well charted. What the fuck are the co-ordinates for Okay?

"I meant, come in," he calls out, louder, needing Wilson to be rubbing his neck and trying to figure it out right alongside him, then flinches his partner's socks shuffle out a soft backtrack on the floorboards.

"Hey," he says, pre-emptively, as the door opens.

"Hey," Wilson echoes.

He stops on the threshold with a habitual faltering glance: the one that stutters sweetly between a shyly polite urge to study the oh so fascinating threads and loops of the bath mat and an appreciative sweep of the long, lean, lithe figure House knows he cuts, even with the smattering of hairs on his chest turning silver and arthritic aches sneaking in beneath the toned lines of muscle, bone and sinew. The latter look wins, wobbles between a warm checking him out and a physician's instinctive double-check of a somewhat unpredictable prone-to-self-harm-both-accidental-and-intentional patient. House waits for a conclusion, hopes for the former; but Wilson's expression sort of stalls between a smile and a frown and he has to half-glance down at himself, just to see that he hasn't somehow wound up with x-ray bathwater, gotten his insides all visible on his outside.

"Ah hell," Wilson remarks. "Did the hospital call?"

"What?" Stupidly, House rescans himself, realises a second later that Wilson's eyes have snagged on the water-blotched phone squatting on the adjacent toilet lid. "Oh. No."

"Oh." Perplexity creases the corners of Wilson's eyes, draws a faint grunted breath into his throat as the muscle movement twinges the bruise. "Then who were you calling?"

House looks up sharply – hearing? imagining? - an accusation. Wilson blinks at him. Innocent? Disingenuous?

Shit. They've definitely _not_ yet docked in Port Okay.

"My shrink." The lie falls out reflexively. He catches himself, corrects: "Wanna-be. It's a secret identity. Without her cape and couch, she's an administrator."

"Cuddy."

There's _definitely_ an edge to that. Being judged, appraised, monitored, Wilson has always struggled with it, with trying to be everything anyone wants, with letting people down. House is an idiot. An idiot conjuring up last night's demons with a cell and shampoo-coloured water, instead of letting them lie with a lie. But that's not going to help either one of them. He's just not sure if he yet knows how to level without one or other of them getting laid out.

"I'd rather talk to Cuddy," he tries, unconsciously taking hold of the sides of the bath, bracing himself to be shoved down, held under. The water is turning to ice-cubes that chop and chitter against his skin.

Wilson swallows, nods as if he sees; the tension on his face says he doesn't.

"She coming over?"

"No."

His ears swoosh, blood rush, submersion. He starts to set his teeth, stiffen his diaphragm against the socking pressure of heavy hands. No. _No_. Wilson's not his father. He's listening, still standing, chest and one cheek pressed to the doorjamb, hands on each of the handles either side, he too searching for an anchor in these strange waters.

"She always takes my side, so I wind up figuring out yours. Wanted to check I had it right. And to gloat."

"About what?"

The question is so uncertain that House's anticipation uncoils in a rush; his breath hustles out and the water warms again. Wilson's dimples flicker simultaneously.

"That we're okay?" he guesses, light and careful.

"'Zactly." House shoves all the conviction behind that he can muster.

"Right."

A half eye roll and Wilson releases the door. He cuts a half-circle around it and moves to the lowered lid of the toilet to sit. He picks up House's phone, makes an automatic move to place it behind him on the cistern, then thinks better of it and passes it across the bath edge beside his head. Bittersweet as it is, House is grateful for the gesture.

"Good walk?" he asks, not because he cares about the walk per-se, but because Wilson seems as disorientated as he is.

"Mmmm." Wilson nods, unconvincing. He curls forward, rests his elbows on his knees and absently finger-combs his dishevelled hair. "Bit strange, actually."

House curls his fingers into a loose ball, half above, half below the water line and squeezes, shoots a jet of water across to burst on Wilson's brow.

"Yeah?"

Brown eyes peek through splayed fingers, corners crinkled, amused; a curtain of wet beads drips from his wind-tousled forelock.

"It was nothing, I guess. There was a police cruiser out. It circled the park a couple of times while I was walking. I thought for a few minutes that, well, y'know—"

The ice returns, inside him now, burns through his veins in a rush. He does. He _does._ How many times has he sicced the cops on Wilson? Five? Seven? More?

He forces guile, though the taste of it sickens him.

"That what? Some omnipotent sky-wizard with a pipe-line to the local station was sending out wingless gun-toting minions to drag you away from me for our own good, even though we managed to finish a fight with hugs, puppies and bacon instead of blood, spit and hate-sex?"

Wilson exhales with a huff. "Yes, House. That's exactly what I thought."

"You're paranoid," House announces.

He curls his abs so he can sit up, leans across and invites a kiss, melds his smirk to Wilson's reluctant smile. He tastes smog and a damp breeze, breath mints, and slightly too much saliva induced by exercise. He mumbles appreciatively as Wilson fits a warm palm to his scratchy jaw and thumbs his throat. And he tells himself that Wilson's changed.

The bright brown hair snaking through his fingers is all soft and floppy and silvering at the temples. The cheekbones beneath his palm have regained their glass-cut sharpness and his quirky one-side-deeper-than-the-other dimples pooch the corners of his mouth when he smiles. As he stands, slowly releasing House's lips to reach for the bathrobe on the back of the door and extends a hand to help him rise too, the cling of his shirt to his torso in the humid air accentuates the natural willowiness to his frame that he's regained running, playing tennis, and working on his boat.

It doesn't suit him quite so well as it did in his twenties and thirties, House observes, as he shrugs into the striped towelling robe, the last of the draining water sloshing around his ankles. The burden of the extra decade renders Wilson perhaps a little gaunt where a few more pounds would soften out the worry lines bracketing his lips and gathered between his bushy brows. But, as he hooks a damp arm around his partner's neck, trading lazy kisses as they three-legged amble back to the nest of blankets and couch cushions spread-out for a day's downtime watching the game, House figures it's no bad thing. At least Wilson's no longer recognisable as the heavy set man, with shorn hair, a strained suit and the start of a double chin, in the mugshot still held on file at the local station.

TBC…


	24. Chapter 24

_Thank you, as always, to all the lovely people who commented and to whom I don't have a link to respond directly - so thrilled everyone is still enjoying themselves!_

* * *

**Part Nineteen**:

They're sodden and shivering in the street again. This time, though, it's not from rowing in a rainstorm. It _is_ because, for the second time in three months, House has locked himself out. He's huddled on the doorstep when Wilson arrives at 221B. The icy February sleet webs his silver hair, glitters on his lashes. His skin is flushed with cold and slicked to his bones. His blue shirt is plastered to his torso. The thin cotton climbs and clings to his pectorals, gullies between the faint ridges of his abdominal muscles.

Wilson gawks at him through the streaming window of the car, caught between a diaphragmatic hiccup of panic and a down low shudder he couldn't help if he tried. He gives treacle thoughts a hurried shove up the sand dunes of sleeplessness, struggles to remember the last twenty-four hours. He was on call last night; there was an emergency; a nine a.m. department meeting; two remissions, one fatality; a board meeting at one; three relapses; the ethics committee at four, which overran its hour-long slot until twenty minutes ago… No, no fights with House. He's not even sure he's _seen_ House since the man rolled over into the warm dent he left at hideous o'clock this morning and started to drool on his pillow. _God, Wilson had wanted to still be there, beneath him, House's lips branding his neck with wet, pinking patches…_

"Come _on_!" House grouses from under the slush pouring off the tiny porch. "You can swim to the kerb from there."

Nothing like an unresolved erection to make an insult sound like a proposition and House is the master of it, after all. Wilson chinks the window and takes a retaliatory pot shot.

"I could leave you there, you know."

"Yeah, yeah." House rolls his eyes, certain that he won't. "Hurry up! Watching me drown isn't a spectator sport!"

_Drama queen._ Biting on a grin, Wilson cocks an eyebrow at him. House's jeans are so heavy they sag, form a bowing bridge between the sharp bones of his hips. The fabric is massed and heavy around the zipper, as if weighted by his cock and balls. Snagged and rucked up from where he has been leaning against the rough bricks, his shirt exposes his lower back when he half-turns towards the door. The uppermost swell of his ass shines with rainwater. Wilson slides his tongue across his lips, shamelessly indulges in the shudder and the sight. House flings an impatient glance over his shoulder and, surely, _surely_, he's too cold for a look that hot.

Do Wilson's cheeks flush from it? Despite his chattering teeth, House is no longer oblivious. As he catches on to Wilson's reasons for dithering, his lips curl delightedly. He cups one hand around his mouth and yells loud enough for the whole street to hear:

"You can sit there and watch or you can come get me out of my clothes!"

That's it. All it takes. With only a flicker of guilt for any accidental voyeurs among the neighbours, Wilson throws open the car door.

It's bucketing down. He's drenched before his leather loafer finds the river racing down the gutter and, yeah, okay, he deserved to have his parking maligned. He gasps as the chill soaks through his sock. He'd cheated, parked in House's disabled bay at the hospital – admittedly expecting to give him a ride home – which is a mere step beyond the large sheltered area out front. The two feet, three stairs, to House's door are an icy gauntlet. His body teems with the collision of the hot southern front that surges up internally and the bitter northern cascade belting down from the sky.

He's at the door in a dash, one hand thrusting the key hard into the lock, the other seizing the back of House's shirt, hauling him inside. What is it that has him sweating so hard he's sure his wet clothes should be steaming? Is it the night's interrupted urge or the teasing or the incredible, _impossible_, trust that House – for whatever reason – would wait to be rescued, by _him_, outside, in the rain?

Wilson doesn't know; suddenly, he doesn't care. He's shoving House back against the closed door, one hand behind his head to stop it cracking the wood, the other twisting at the buttons on his slippery shirt. He kisses him, kisses him so hard and deep that they can't swallow, that spit mixes and overflows, hot and wet and _god_, so good.

House's hands tear at his belt, one wraps over the buckle to silence that triggering jingle. It's gone, a brown leather serpent shoved under the mail table. House's cane follows suit and he drags Wilson to the ground. Down, onto his knees, onto that patch of colour-parched carpet that he'll never not see. Down into another frenzied kiss. Down, House's hands inside Wilson's pants. Down, House's voice, low and dirty and demanding as he cups Wilson's balls.

"Since these haven't frozen off, how 'bout using them?"

Down go Wilson's last defences.

His answer isn't verbal. It's hasty hands and anti-bacterial gel snatched from his discarded briefcase. It's House's thighs hoisted over his shoulders, wet jeans shucked to half-mast hooked behind and chafing the nape of his neck. It's House scrabbling for handholds on the broadloom, eyes electric, throat growing raw. It's his own hearty cries at being _inside_, all in: the house, _their_ house, _his_ House.

It's wondering if the DIY guy upstairs is calling the cops on them…

They come down slowly, shaking. House hisses as Wilson eases out from under his bad leg, coaxes it straight. He rolls to the other side, giving him room to sit; instead House reels against him, bites warm wet 'o's into his neck. The second time is slower, lazier, curious, but no less loud.

* * *

"What were you doing on the doorstep?"

Eyeing their reflections in the bathroom mirror – concealed carpet burn aside, they've cleaned up well – Wilson pats product into his dry hair and rearranges his cowlick for the fifth time. He needs to look presentable, not like he just got well and truly laid. Twice. Unless he can get the stupid grin off his face, though, it's not going to work.

Behind him, House gives his bowtie a disgruntled tug. In deference to the no-black-bowties rule Cuddy has imposed on all the hospital staff for the night, the silk is a brilliant, drowning blue: a perfect match for his fathomless eyes. Wilson's stomach swirls as, for a split-second, he feels he could tumble forward into the mirror, into House again, open that tie and grab it as his only anchor, then let himself free-fall as they surge together, dissolve into one another…

_Fu-uck. They're never going to get to the fundraiser._

"Lost my keys," House grumbles, holding Wilson's eyes in the glass just long enough to acknowledge that he, too, would infinitely prefer a more private, passionate night to the one they have lined up. "Pocket lining in my bike jacket tore. Didn't notice when I left the office. Keys are somewhere in a gutter between here and the hospital. You might want to change your locks. And tell Cuddy Diagnostics is no longer secure."

Wilson tears his attention away from the mirror before he can imagine it fogging up in an oh-so-cheesy rom-com cliché and, with a final finger-tuck of his forelock, declares victory over his hair. Belatedly, he processes what House has said and does a double take.

"Hoh! Wait a second. Why me?"

"'Cause I'm going to share your office 'til someone can get mine unlocked." He sidles closer, eyes dipping down to check out the strict lines of Wilson's starched shirt, fingers snaking around his waist to tease it out of his waistband, roll his hips against the tight curves of Wilson's ass. "Don't want to get surprised by some crazy contraband seeker hoping to score on my new stash."

Wilson would snort at the idea of anyone hunting House down to share his limited supply of Amytriptalin and Pregablin, but he's struggling to remember how to do anything but grip the sink, bend over it until his forehead knocks the cool glass and his breath mists their faces, nose smudging a tiny clear patch that is almost instantly blurred away again.

"Let 'em have it," he gasps. "Who needs hard drugs?"

"Beats me."

House presses closer, braces his left fist against the tile to take the weight off his right side. He cants his hips, presses _there_, and rubs his shaven chin up Wilson's carotid until his head falls forward. Wilson moans. The sound is the only thing still soft.

He's sure he should care that they're going to be stupidly late, that he's going to spend the evening trying to play poker sat on clenched ass muscles, that tonight is the first time they've ever tried to alternate this kind of give and take. His suit pants crumple. House growls low and throaty at the lack of boxers. A warm hand slides over Wilson's bare skin and, no, he really _doesn't _care. Doesn't try. He just groans: _please. Yes, please._

* * *

That's it. All and everything. Damn, Wilson feels old as he yawns his way through the traffic toward the hospital. House is half-asleep in the passenger seat. If it weren't for the idle strumming of his fingers against the thigh seam of Wilson's tux, he'd think House were completely zonked. Driving on autopilot, he joins his partner basking in the afterglow of endorphins and the steady flow of oxycotin. Once they stop, once manners dictate House let go, once Oncology's straining budget is the focus of the evening, Wilson's going to have a hard time keeping his eyes open. Schmoozing is about to become snoozing.

His luck is out, though, because even by night the hospital is rarely a restful place. Exit and restricted access signs blare in evergreen and valentine red, bright as the port and starboard warning lanterns on ships combing the night seas. Lighthouse-brilliant white and yellow mega-watts burn through the windows, seeming as if they could be seen for miles. The tannoys tend to go quiet, but there are intermittent wails of approaching rigs, the peals of intradepartmental calls from E.R. to O.R. to wards, waiting rooms, reception desks and back again, drips protesting as they run empty, monitors chirping, the night-staff talking, charts rustling and a thousand other twenty-four-seven sounds. All add to the traditional joys of sharing quarters with other bodies: snoring, sniffling, sleep-talking, somnambulism, trips to the toilet, side lamps going on and off, radios humming through earphones, the whisper of e-reader pages turning, the _shh-flick_ of books and magazines being skimmed through, murmured cell calls and the phosphorous fragments flaring around the sides of bedside TVs to reflect on the glossed walls.

Tonight, the place is positively gaudy. The car lot is crammed with Bentleys, Mercs, Hummers and convertibles: status-mobiles. An eye-wateringly cheerful banner festoons the main entrance. A nod to the upcoming fourteenth – Hallmark's Happy Massacre, House mutters as they park in his bay and climb out – sparkles in long candy-crimson streamers featuring anatomically accurate hearts and starbursts that only an ophthalmologist would recognise as symptomatic of a nystagmus. Hospital humour. The kind that's only funny after seventy-two hours without sleep, a caffeine overdose and a life-or-death decision to make. Wilson's tired enough to smile just a little as the automatic doors swish open and the streamers swirl playfully around their heads.

"There you are!"

The snick of a cell-phone closing greets them before House has finished swatting irritably at the shiny tendrils. With uncanny timing, Cuddy has excused herself from her courteous conquering duties amongst the donors to – if need be – text House an earful of threats if he doesn't show up.

Amidst the gleam and slightly macabre sparkle that conceals the crisp utilitarianism of the free Clinic-cum-function-room, her presence is that of some kind of Dorothy, sans the red shoes. Long dark curls corkscrewing over her bare shoulders, Cuddy is all glamour in a glorious body-con dress that shimmers green-gold under the strip lights. The figure-hugging skirt stops just below her knees, twines up into a cleverly textured bodice with its threads woven together like intricately patterned wicker. It is sleeveless, set slightly off the shoulder, with the individual strands seeming to come unlaced so that the broad straps show thread-thin glimpses of pale skin below. The neckline is her favourite plunging style and shows off her ample décolleté, which is, strangely tastefully, distracted from by a necklace of intertwined gold snake-chains, choker tight and gathered at the throat with a gold clasp so that long fronds trail freely down her sternum in an unexpectedly elegant cross between a cat-o-nine-tails and a Scout's neckerchief.

House takes one look at her and snorts loudly.

"Dib dib dib, dob dob dob," he says, fake-saluting her with his middle and index finger to his temple. "Where's the rest of the troupe, oh fearless leader?"

Cuddy covers a flustered moment with a glare. Jarred out of her element in a way that only House can achieve, she is momentarily wrong-footed, disconcerted, even hurt. Before Wilson can open his mouth to offer an automatic reassurance, House sweeps a second look steadily up and down their boss and declares:

"You picked the wrong dress if you wanted me to concentrate on the room full of boring people tonight."

_Ow. Fuck._ A pleased flush colours Cuddy's cheeks; Wilson feels himself pale. With all that they've been working through, he'd not really noticed that House had quit flirting with her some time between now and their previous break-up. It had been so normal, yet so deliberately jibing, back then, just another bullet in House's canon to send blazing across Wilson's bows. This unexpected shot – if that's what it is – burns worse, makes him wonder if it had never ceased at all but gone behind closed doors, become a worse threat than any of House's speed-dial sluts. He and she had, after all, had a fling in college. Had he lied when he said he'd been alone after the split? What if he'd rekindled that old flame? Suddenly the pretty chains around Cuddy's neck look like a great way to hoist her up against the nearest―_stop it_.

The voice. _That_ voice. With a start, Wilson realises it's back. It's been quiet for such a while now that he's shaken to hear it whispering through his head again. He begins to clench his fists, then quickly forces his fingers to uncoil and reaches for House's hand to ground himself. Cuddy's smokily made-up eyes tick downward, as if she's…

"Jealous much?"

House mutters it out of the corner of his mouth and, before Wilson has a chance to realise what's happening, his back is flat against the wall he wanted to string Cuddy against and House's mouth is on his, hotly possessive and deeply reassuring.

Cuddy huffs, looks politely elsewhere and over her shoulder to check that no one in the lobby has glanced their way. House pulls back with a slow lick of his lips that makes a shiver shear up Wilson's spine at the thought of other places House will put his tongue and savour the taste like that. All other thoughts momentarily capsize in a wave of apparently unslakable need.

"Finished?" she enquires. Then, with startling acuity adds: "And I know I look lovely, thank you, Dr Wilson."

His own colour, already returned by the kiss, rises a few more notches. _So. You need her to break the tension, do you? Can't you control yourself?_

_Not again! _Gritting his teeth, Wilson flashes her an abashed smile, orders himself to believe there's no shame in a friend knowing him well enough to see his discomfort or in being gently ribbed for it.

"So do you, both of you," she continues, and counters House's earlier pornographic body-scan with an equally x-rated one of her own.

_Shut up!_ Wilson inwardly shouts, before the voice can get a word in. He can feel it priming itself, but House speaks next, with a suggestive waggle of his eyebrows.

"Wanna cut the party and go have a threesome in the backseat?"

"Hoh!kay."

"Aaand we're going in now."

As one, Wilson and Cuddy turn towards the gathering. Smirking like the manipulative bastard he is, House saunters after them.

* * *

"So, where do we pick up our balaclavas and our collecting tins?" House demands as they enter the melee of decorated bodies and bubbling conversation. He turns to Cuddy and mimes shaking a can like a Charity Mugger on the high street, tongue and teeth clicking together to simulate loose change. "Or should I have brought a hat to hold out for the donations?"

"Just direct anyone who will give you time of night toward the giant black hole in the space-time continuum labelled Diagnostics," she sighs.

Saluted with a champagne glass from across the room, she switches on a smile and with a hissed _behave yourself_ glides away on her tall gold Manolo Blahnik's, which Wilson finds he recognises as the Jewelled Metallic Slides she demanded his opinion on less than a week ago. He glances quickly away before House can catch on and make a crack about queer stereotypes. He's already responsible for the dark-pink bowtie Wilson is wearing.

Fortunately, his mind is elsewhere.

"Black hole? Where? I can't just throw myself into it?" he mutters, eyes skittering around in a mock-frenetic hunt for an escape route. "Whoosh, bam, splat. Aww, Greg!" His fingers sketch out the cartoon plummet and explosion of his own demise. "No me. No department. No money necessary."

"There's no gravity in space," Wilson reminds him. "It won't help."

He raises a hand to Brown, who is fastidiously making the rounds with the air of one doing the job that Cuddy has misguidedly bestowed upon an unworthy young urchin with the audacity to turn up thirty-five minutes after seven for a between seven and eight p.m. start. Acknowledging the rebuke with a facial shrug for House, Wilson straightens his tie and starts to move away.

Long fingers curl around his wrist, stalling him. One finger whispers tantalizingly over the thin skin over his veins. He glances down, throat catching at the golden wink from the custom-made white-coat and stethoscope-wearing Care Bear cufflinks House left tucked in a box in his jacket pocket sometime before the evening began.

"Could come with me," House murmurs, all huskiness and hot breath, shoulder pressed warm and promisingly against Wilson's. "Pull the fabric of the universe over our heads, race to be the first to see comets and stars—

Wilson stops him with a sharp elbow, smiles politely at the approaching flurry of skirts and scent that surrounds one of his department's regular donors. He has to bite down on a squeak as House snickers in his ear, pinching his ass before he sidles off, making a beeline for the aperitifs on the long, white-draped reception desk cum buffet bar. Within moments, he's lurking a few feet away, cocktail sticks protruding from below his upper lip, pretending to suck the blood out of an oblivious – and obese – gentleman in the process of writing Cuddy a cheque. Wilson inhales a trachea full of fizz, scarcely avoids snorting champagne down the sequinned sweetheart neckline of Mrs Moneybags. Grinning smugly, House snakes back into the crowd, no doubt intent on blackmailing Foreman into putting his escapades as a juvenile delinquent to good use by nabbing people's wallets as he circulates.

TBC...


End file.
